honestly that’s the best thing about stuff like this. the average windows user simply not knowing what they have. Take thinkpads for example. you’d THINK the average thinkpad user would know what they have. a god damn brilliant rock solid laptop. nope. business dudes just toss those things once they hit the 4 to 5 year mark. I now have 5 thinkpads I bought online for dirt cheap that all run linux like a dream. And the beauty of thinkpads is it’s so damn easy to install multiple OS’/Distros on the same machine just hitting F12 at boot and picking which one you want.
I dunno, I bought my first ThinkPad, then a used ThinkServer, then advised a family member to get a ThinkPad.
My TP battery dies with light tasks from full to flat in less than an hour; it is shelved most of the time, used for specific purposes, booted maybe 50x in 4 years. The battery was replaced under extended warranty and within a month it was just as degraded as the one it replaced. There is no Linux support, since it has a cellular model, so after a month of testing I settled on Xubuntu. It only has 2 USB C ports, one disguised as a dock port, and 1 USB A port. This machine was $1.5k USD and the extended warranty was a few dollars shy of that amount, too. Buyers remorse out the ass.
The TS, it’s a tower config, the parts are good on paper but they use proprietary psu connectors and, I shit you not, a proprietary cpu heatsink mounting holes, so you can’t replace it with off-the-shelf parts (they drilled the holes bigger, then added retention pegs). Following the bios update instructions to the letter, including a ups, killed both boards (yes, I bought an identical replacement). The case is trash and makes doing anything internally a huge pain in the ass. I recently swapped to a different board and case during an upgrade, it’s so much better.
The TP my father bought at my suggestion (he didn’t want to wait for a Framework) arrived with cooling issues, online forums say it’s a known issue for over a year. I swapped it for an identical unit, but nope, same issue. I sent it back and got a custom build of a different TP family, waited the month for it to arrive, booted it up, no cooling issues… aaaand Windows isn’t activated, no key present. Support wanted to swap the mobo or send it back so I let them do the song and dance with a tech swapping the board. It didn’t solve the problem, of course, so I reach out and say ‘either refund the $200 we paid for the windows license, give me the key, or I want a full refund’. We ordered a Framework the next day and sent the TP back.
I definitely missed the boat on TPs being amazing, because this is utter dogshit.
My current “beater” laptop Is a Lenovo P71. Wouldn’t take Windows 11, so it got chucked in the recycle pile. I snagged it, provisioned a power supply and an SSD, and it runs like a dream with Linux. I like it enough, that I may even purchase a battery for it, so it doesn’t die when I move it around.
Linux users already waiting in line at pawn shops to install mint xfce on them after they get thrown out.
honestly that’s the best thing about stuff like this. the average windows user simply not knowing what they have. Take thinkpads for example. you’d THINK the average thinkpad user would know what they have. a god damn brilliant rock solid laptop. nope. business dudes just toss those things once they hit the 4 to 5 year mark. I now have 5 thinkpads I bought online for dirt cheap that all run linux like a dream. And the beauty of thinkpads is it’s so damn easy to install multiple OS’/Distros on the same machine just hitting F12 at boot and picking which one you want.
I dunno, I bought my first ThinkPad, then a used ThinkServer, then advised a family member to get a ThinkPad.
My TP battery dies with light tasks from full to flat in less than an hour; it is shelved most of the time, used for specific purposes, booted maybe 50x in 4 years. The battery was replaced under extended warranty and within a month it was just as degraded as the one it replaced. There is no Linux support, since it has a cellular model, so after a month of testing I settled on Xubuntu. It only has 2 USB C ports, one disguised as a dock port, and 1 USB A port. This machine was $1.5k USD and the extended warranty was a few dollars shy of that amount, too. Buyers remorse out the ass.
The TS, it’s a tower config, the parts are good on paper but they use proprietary psu connectors and, I shit you not, a proprietary cpu heatsink mounting holes, so you can’t replace it with off-the-shelf parts (they drilled the holes bigger, then added retention pegs). Following the bios update instructions to the letter, including a ups, killed both boards (yes, I bought an identical replacement). The case is trash and makes doing anything internally a huge pain in the ass. I recently swapped to a different board and case during an upgrade, it’s so much better.
The TP my father bought at my suggestion (he didn’t want to wait for a Framework) arrived with cooling issues, online forums say it’s a known issue for over a year. I swapped it for an identical unit, but nope, same issue. I sent it back and got a custom build of a different TP family, waited the month for it to arrive, booted it up, no cooling issues… aaaand Windows isn’t activated, no key present. Support wanted to swap the mobo or send it back so I let them do the song and dance with a tech swapping the board. It didn’t solve the problem, of course, so I reach out and say ‘either refund the $200 we paid for the windows license, give me the key, or I want a full refund’. We ordered a Framework the next day and sent the TP back.
I definitely missed the boat on TPs being amazing, because this is utter dogshit.
My current “beater” laptop Is a Lenovo P71. Wouldn’t take Windows 11, so it got chucked in the recycle pile. I snagged it, provisioned a power supply and an SSD, and it runs like a dream with Linux. I like it enough, that I may even purchase a battery for it, so it doesn’t die when I move it around.