• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • lenovo. replaced my old dell precision laptop with a T480 and I’m loving it.

    dell pros:

    • fast
    • solid gpu for the time
    • clean look
    • came with linux.

    dell cons:

    • battery swelled up, made the trackpad and keyboard not work. replaced the battery a lot.
    • keyboard wore out well before lenovo
    • chassis screws fell out and then the hinge broke as a result. this is not a thing with lenovo.
    • front edge was too sharp and slightly cut into my wrists. not a show stopper but annoyed me the whole time I owned it.

    For your situation 16G may be adequate. But 24 is better.





  • I think the thinkpad T14 series is pretty mainstream for linux - except for the Gen6 snapdragon one. Arch wiki thinks the gen5 will work

    I had a top of the line Dell (precision 5520) that I bought with Ubuntu on it, so it ran linux very well. But there were quality issues, mainly the battery swelling up and making the keyboard stop working. Then the screws for the case fell out and the hinge kind of broke, and the power connector stopped working, as did its replacement. I think you aren’t really supposed to work on the dells yourself as it had special screws, not plain philips heads.

    Maintainability on thinkpads is better, in general. And I like the way the computer feels more - just better design.









  • nixos, same as the last 10 years. more packages than ever on it, and I’m better at wrangling nix stuff now for my own packages. Besides my personal machines, I also use it to admin several servers for work. All the config for all the machines goes into git and I can see exactly what changed and when, configuration-wise.






  • With a machine like that, you’re firmly in the mainstream of linux. Almost any distro will run well on it, so selection is a matter of taste.

    Debian is a solid, conservative option, though they have a reputation of lagging behind other distros in terms of software versions. I do like arch, their wiki is first rate. It has the reputation of being finicky but I’ve always found it pretty straightforward. Great for the extensive docs and not trying to insulate you from the system.

    I personally would avoid ubuntu these days, they seem to be leaning into the Ubuntu Way for things like installing software. A bit lock-in ish for me.

    FWIW I’m running nixos on my thinkpads, works great. Nixos is not to be undertaken lightly, there’s a lot to learn and docs are meh. Stability is second to none, and the declarative configuration management makes it great for easing into devops.