this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Thinkpad A485. If you're going used, I would grab a T460, T470, or T480. Really reliable models, all those can be had for $300 or less online, work great with Linux, and last forever. Plus they are decently repairable.
If new, I would also go with Framework laptops. Super repairable and sustainable. And very high quality laptops. My friend got one and it is super nice. Runs Fedora on it flawlessly.
I had one of those, but the trackpad occasionally wouldn't work until I rebooted several times (I was using fedora). Did you run into any similar issue?
Had that happen after BIOS updates. Sending it to sleep and waking it up once always fixed it for me.
Not with the trackpad, but other issues yeah. For some reason, this model seems to be really finicky depending on the distro you use.
I had weird random issues with most distros I've tried on it over the years.
The two distros that have worked with almost no issues are Manjaro, and Mint Debian Edition, which is what I currently run on it.
The most frequent I had with it were random lockups when bringing it out of sleep mode.
what they said but don't go below T480; the performance jump is huge (quad vs dual-core) and the price difference is negligible while almost everything is interchangeable (screens, keyboards, cards, plastic parts, dock stations, etc.).
T480 should be attainable around the $/€ 200 mark nowadays as they're 5-6 gens behind and upgrading 'em to like 16 or 32 GB and 1TB NVMe or more is stupid cheap.
that's right, the T480 is the best upgradable thinkpad there is, you can even up the ram to 64gb
Fair point. Some folks are on an ultra tight budget or prefer the older model for various reasons.
But I agree, at $200-$300 used, you can't really go wrong with the T480. Really nice specs for most use cases, and still fairly repairable and upgradable.
I've got a T480 and it gets really good battery life. Having a hot swapable battery is nice too. I would suggest avoiding the ones with a dedicated GPU though. They are power hungry and don't have enough performance to be worth it.
The A485 is actually such a terrible laptop. I would never reccomend such garbage to anyone considering mine almost never worked properly. I had in three years have six main board replacements for various hardware faults. Not a single of the boards has been free from severe hardware faults.