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.
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.