New Laptop, Who Dis?

The Saga

I remember in back in college when I was shopping for a new laptop, I thought about buying a Thinkpad. Thinkpads have always had the reputation of being well-built, reliable, and powerful machines. So obviously, I wanted one. And you just know that that “hacker” aesthetic was a bonus. I remember after doing some research, I learned that Lenovo had acquired Thinkpad and I thought “well that isn’t good”. I was quite skeptical of the direction that Lenovo might steer the Thinkpad line into. I quickly abandoned my dreams of owning a Thinkpad and looked for other options.

Boy was I wrong. Lenovo has done a great job with their Thinkpad lines. Their laptops are great! And I keep hearing good things about the T480 even though it’s quite an old model now. The fact that it can still keep up is amazing.

So anyways, this past month, I have decided to buy a Thinkpad. I have been thinking about getting a new laptop for about 6 months now. Just didn’t really dedicate myself into deep diving into research. And uh, dived deep did I go.

I ended up making an entire table focusing on features that I wanted to include. Upgradable RAM is a must and since I already had a 1TB M.2 2280 NVME SSD on hand, I wanted to either add a second drive or replace the current drive entirely.

The Thinkpad Table

Here it is 😅

It’s not a complete table but it has most of what I needed. Hopfully this would help someone else.

So What Did I End Up With?

T14 Gen 3 Intel version. And yes, I know that the 12th Gen chips tend to run hot, but meh, it does what I need it to do and the battery life isn’t that bad. I will probably end up upgrading to a bigger battery (52wh) later on, but for now, it serves its purpose.

The best part was that I bought this used and it still had 2 years of manufacturer warranty left! And there wasn’t a scratch on it at all. Imagine my surprise.

Upgrades

This laptop already has 16gb of RAM soldered into the motherboard, but more RAM = better right? I upgraded with 16GB DDR4 RAM, totaling of 32GB of RAM and swapped out the 256GB NVME SSD with a 1TB NVME SSD.

Choosing an Operating System

I was conflicted on which Linux distribution I wanted to install. I love Arch, and I had heard about NixOS from attending the SCaLE 21x expo, but I also wanted something that just works without too much tinkering. Too bad. There are drawbacks of using a “stable” OS. It’s not bleeding edge! So I have to wait for features.

I figured that jumping straight into NixOS is an act of a mad man (or woman), and I was up for the challenge but this laptop was meant to be used for anything I would need in the wild an did not have the time to be tinkering JUST to make this one thing work. And so, I installed Ubuntu and will be using it conjunction with nix pkgs and home manager.

I haven’t used this OS in years. The last time I did, I decided that it was clunky, slow and not worth it. I went to Manjaro and never looked back. I still have Manjaro as my daily driver on my desktop!

So far, it’s been snappy. I’m glad Ubuntu decided to move away from unity to gnome.

Final Thoughts

This laptop is great! Fast, snappy and installed Ubuntu beautifully. The battery life could be better but I already knew that when I bought it. Again, I’ll probably replace the battery. Also, I think I could do some fiddling to improve battery duration. Right now, it averages at around 3-4 hours depending on the computer load.

One complaint I do have though, is the touchpad. It. Is. A. Grease. Magnet. I would like a touchpad that I would not have to clean so often. Maybe I will get a sticker/film for it once it annoys me enough.