I just wanted to make a post in appreciation of the beautiful experience of running Linux on a Thinkpad as a main system. I picked up my X1 Extreme 2nd gen (now known as the P1) in 2019 and never even booted its Windows OS. Pop!_OS went into it immediately and it has only let me down once (grub screw up that was relatively easy to fix). I’m looking at this system that has been in constant use for almost seven years and I just cannot find a reason to upgrade to the P1. It’s just flawless.
Linux on a Thinkpad is the ultimate workhorse IMHO.
Found a T430 bascially in a dumpster - some guy was about to throw it away, we just had to 3d-print a power button, take out a broken ram stick and clean it up. Looks like new now. Installed Cachy and KDE on it, as i´m just used to Arch but didn´t want the headache of setting it up. Now it´s the workhorse at my workplace. this 14yr old brick is just nicer to use than the other laptops at our disposal :D
For private use i got a T420, using it to watch stuff in bed, read books and even retro gaming. It´s almost in daily use and fulfills my needs without any hiccups :D
Yes, ThinkPad is great for Linux. Only had/have a few but always a pleasure to use. So reliable. Plus I really don’t like touchpads so ThinkPads for the win. Even have two ThinkPad standalone keyboards (one wireless, one wired) for when I hook up to a mobile device, media box, or mini PC.
T21, Pentium III - Slackware 12 & Windows XP
SL510 2847DKU - MX Linux 21.2.1_(respin) FVWM_Ext, OpenBSD, and Void Linux
E15 Gen 3, AMD Ryzen 7 - Slackware 15
X1 Carbon Gen 3, Intel Core i7 - Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile Spin
Anyone know if it’s possible to use the SIM slot in the X1 Carbon? Also, any recommendations for an alternate distro that is ideal for that laptop/tablet combo?
For mobile internet with a SIM you might wanna check out this Arch Wiki Page. It´s actually easy to set up in KDE BUUUUT my Thinkpad (T420) only supports 3G, which has been shut off.
Not a Thinkpad, but here’s my story. Last year I’ve bought myself a 2017 Acer Travelmate B117 for 13 euros to learn Linux, to see if I was ready to make the switch from Windows. I thought of it as a throwaway toy.
It has a Pentium N3710, 4GB of RAM and 128GB eMMC storage with a 720p display. It came with Windows 10. Ran like shit. One tab of Firefox and it was a slideshow.
So I installed openSUSE first. It wasn’t very fast, but battery life was 8 hours and Firefox worked fine. I learned to like it, ended up buying a mini PC for experimenting with self-hosting. That also went well. So I started experimenting with installing Arch Linux on this laptop (as it’s hard, but teaches you a lot about Linux). On like the 7th try it finally worked!
I run Arch on all my computers ever since, except the home server, which runs Debian for stability. This 13 euro e-waste of a laptop became my daily driver because I love how portable it is.
Thank you Linux and open-source devs. You’ve brought back my love for computers, while saving old devices from the bin.
Thinkpad T420, i5-2520M, 8Gb RAM, 2 x 1TB SATA SSD, 1 x mSATA and a mmc card. Some usb storage plugged in for good measure.
It was bought 2nd hand for children to use, then workshop laptop, eventually retired as occasional NAS space running OMV 8 (Debian Trixie).
I expect it to just work forever.
my first professional experience with linux came doing tech support for ubunu & red hat on thinkpads.
this was the mid aughts so they were t40’s, t60’s & x60’s and i always marveled at how well they were engineered; you used to be able to swap out the hard drives, keyboards, displays & cases without tools (but it was easier if you had atleast a screw driver around).
it was so easy that it would be one of the first things that we would do to minimize amount of time that the engineers spent getting tech support. if they had even the slight tangentially hardware related compliant like slow wifi; we would almost automatically pull out the harddrive and slap it into another shell and send them on their way.
T60, my dearest, oldest friend.
the t60’s in particular never stopped surprising me at how much abuse they can take.
and engineer had accidentally run over it with her car and it still booted.
I bought a thinkpad specifically to run Linux
Same, but also for TrackPoint. I have the touchpad disabled. I don’t need to move my hand away from keyboard, I can endlessly scroll through pages at varying speeds just by finger pressure, and even cooler, I can scroll sideways just as easily. Oh, and I can also scroll both vertically and horizontally combined, to just easily navigate in the 2D space, pretty cool.
Although I also use the touchscreen a lot. I don’t want a regular laptop anymore. Unfortunately the 360 ThinkPads seem a bit rare when trying to find a used one.Let me check what I could get if I tried to buy it new.
ThinkPad L13. Intel Core Ultra 5 125U, 16GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD, 1920x1200 IPS, WiFi 6E, plastic body. €1,398.76 with 3% student discount. That seems overpriced, at the very least for my use case.You can also double-tap the clit, although my T480 doesn’t seem to react to that.
Old carbon X1 still going strong. Bought it refurbished six years ago for a couple hundred bucks, still going strong.
When I bought a laptop after self publishing my first book, I went with a thinkpad specifically because they handle linux so well. t480
That’s been a few years now, and it’s still running smooth, no issues at all, even with mint having been upgraded a few times.
Noice. Flawless T480 experience with Arch Linux here. Also one of the last real modular ThinkPads - I swapped the storage, memory and WiFi card. It feels like a piece of hardware from 2026.
X1 carbon gen 12 running QubesOS
Sidenote: honestly loving the posting you’re doing here and elsewhere.
Just installed debian on a S440 tonight to replace a HP Pavilion that had just ejected its charge port. Doubt the thinkpad will have the same problem, the HPs flex so much I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
The thinkpad install was flawless, even had the wifi drivers in the installer without needing non-free.
Old t430 for mail and whatnot (read degoogling) It’s an absolute pleasure to have a machine that’s just to the point, no extra bs.
I’m on an oldish (only a few years old) Thinkbook and same experience, it just works and was super easy to get going.
i used popos when i had a system76 machine because of the support and always wondered what others get out of it if they don’t have the support. is it preferable to ubuntu or fedora or any other distro for any particular reason?
Interface. Mint if you are coming from Windows. Pop!_OS if you are coming from MacOS. Neither is identical to the inspiration, but they each offer a smoother pathway from their respective inspirations.
T495s here.
