It’s probably been 15 years since I’ve used Linux and Mint seems to be the recommended distro for people who aren’t all that familiar with Linux like me, but I didn’t know if there was anything I should know with this ThinkPad model that anyone is familiar with. My searching around shows people saying everything from it was painless to install to they had tons of issues and I have no idea how common either one is.
So any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Yes - you’ll be well-served by the ThinkPad line in general. My first permanently dedicated Linux machine was a T430 and true to form things largely “just worked.”
That was enough years ago that I might well have needed to seed the network drivers on the usb key, and that was the worst of it.
They’re tanks, and the hw is generally easy and fairly intuitive to swap out the usual memory and HDD.
IIRC my first distro on that was Debian, had plenty of docs about the intersection of the distro and ThinkPad line.
Mint should be perfectly fine given that.
I will say that I try not to do fresh installs on unfamiliar hardware w/o some other available form of connectivity, my phone mostly is quite sufficient for the purpose. It’s just easier not to risk putting myself in a difficult position in the first place.
You’re in for some fun.
Awesome, thanks!