Low hanging fruit, but whatever. It is what it is.
Dell E6400 can be flashed with libreboot without tools and is easily obtainable from Ebay.
Old ThinkPads, the poor man’s Framework.
Rather proto-Framework
I tried to buy a system 76 pangolin but they don’t ship to Australia (yet?)
Sad
But in Australia you CAN get an old Thinkpad, so…
Need grunt
System76 and Framework are mostly North America and Western Europe. Pine64 might sell in Australia.
Pangolin is the only laptop they haven’t got RCM approval on for Australia yet
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
What did you order? Seems the Pangolin is the only one they are still waiting for approval on
Maybe I’m missing something, but I finally retired my old laptop for a ThinkPad X13 a few weeks ago and it’s been perfect for my use case. Build quality is solid, battery life is alright, it’s small and light, and everything worked out of the box with the preinstalled Ubuntu. After testing it all I slapped EndeavourOS in there and have had zero issues. Specs are solid and I got it for like $1200. Even the AMD integrated graphics are punching way above what I expected.
Just curious about what folks are complaining about with the newer Lenovo models.
Fwiw this meme isn’t piling on any Lenovo Thinkpad hate you’ve seen if I understand it correctly (which I may not)
You could buy a nice gaming laptop for that price. I thought the appeal of think pads was that you buy an old one cheap. It’s just me I guess but I don’t enjoy using them.
Maybe I could, but I’m not using it for gaming so battery life, portability, and fan noise don’t have to be sacrificed for a few more FPS when I wanna play something light on the road.
The Tim Taylor approach to hardware was great when I was a kid, less so in my 40s looking to do some moderate coding and radio projects on the road away from my massively overbuilt gaming rig I already own. This lil guy checks all those boxes. I was just wondering what specific hate there was on newer models.
my recommendation: a second-hand, 16 year old acer aspire one that runs windows xp, ms-dos and the 32bit version of puppylinux…if it works it works. (yeah its just my setup)
been working flawlessly on original hardware since 2008
i even play games and make music on that thing
I got unbuntu on my xiaomi notebook with a nice oled screen. It worked almost immediately. Easier install then windows. I chose Ubuntu as my first linux because of lots of support.
As far as I heard, their designs are similar to macbooks, are the keyboards as terrible?
I think its a preference, I prefer the keyboard over mac. But the build quality and hardware is just really good for the price.
So all the qualities of XM phones and no drawbacks, like miui and official software support? Great.
None of these have an OLED or DCI-P3 coverage so… pass
It seems there are OLED panels you can just buy and install into framework.
It looks all theoretical—you could say similar about any laptop at that rate of buying a random panel & popping it in while praying it works. If you don’t have a plan for the original panel, congrats: you created e-waste since the OEM isn’t selling what you need. Maybe they should just offer a tested version since there is obvious demand.
as cool as they are the last time a good thinkpad came out was over a decade ago, so u are either just buying a normal laptop same quality as all the others or something so old its basically useless. They arent even cheap anymore cuz everyone wants them, its time to face reality refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality, u would probably be better off buying some random gaming laptop most of them are pretty well put together, easy to take apart and upgradable tho thick and heavy.
Depends on what you do. my daily driver is a $20 x200. works great for my needs. But I don’t game
yea, thinkpads aren’t the only laptops that can be bought used
refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality
Off-lease enterprise laptops are generally the best deals available for a good laptop for not too much cash. When you can get something 3-5 years old for 1/3 the price of a brand new laptop and know it still has quite a bit of life left, its hard to beat.
This simply isn’t true. They are still cheap even for decent stuff. I got a T15 Gen 2 when it was 2.5yrs old for about $400 on eBay. You’re not going to get an even remotely decent laptop in most cases for that kind of money. And to be clear, I love old Thinkpads. I have them going back to the IBM days.
Modern Thinkpads: -easy to work on -plenty fast for most things -still made of the carbon composite and magnesium chassis we like -hinges are beefy -upgradeable ram -available with GPU -lighter and easier to daily than any of the old chonks -replaceable keyboard, track pad and track point, and fingerprint -dual thunderbolt connection (and docks are stupid cheap… I find them for $30 sometimes)
Downsides exist but they’re not the end of the world: -one drive slot (drives are huge now, who cares) -8gb of RAM is soldered but the rest is not (max 40gb) -internal battery but laptop is faster and has better battery life than my maxed out T580
Thinkpads were never cheap around here. Asus are cheap. The quality is many orders of different.
Some gaming laptops are good, but others are just as crappy as normal laptops. New smaller thinkpads are still good enough, if you need a small laptop.
I have a decent gaming laptop It’s a pain in the ass for collage tho I didn’t buy it for collage but I also can’t really afford to buy something else
It’s too big and the battery life sucks
Basically the least portable laptop
Laptops can be compared to cars, you can buy an economical car (with higher range and lower costs, but less power) or a sporscar/muscle car (terrible economy, loud, but higher performance)
I got some used chromebooks on Ebay for $40 each (3855u, 4gb ram, 32gb ssd), I would recommend them if you don’t have any money to spend on a laptop. It’s not going to be running anything super demanding, but its shocking how much it can do.
Some things I have run on it and had a decent experience: Blender, FreeCAD, Portal, TMNF through proton, Celeste, Minecraft Java, MuseScore
are pinebooks even meant for regular use?
Opensource chromebooks. Yep.
x220 ftw!!
Heck yeah
Refurbished ThinkPads are available in countries where Framework, System76, and Pine64 do not ship.
Besides, ThinkPads are really well-built machines that perform well for everyday tasks at a fraction of their (or the aforementioned competition’s) original price.
I love my two machines, which are from before Lenovo took over completely. Their keyboards, port selection, and repairability are almost unparalleled compared to today’s competition.
I like my system 76!
buy any AMD laptop, replace the wifi card, install your favorite distro and it will run like magic.
You get a new, capable, and power-efficient device, while not bothering with damn old ThinkPads or giving insane amount of money to s76.
why replace the wifi? i find the amd (mediatek?) cards work well enough.
AMD laptops almost always ship with mediatek wifi cards. Cuz the alternative is intel, and I guess that’s not cool with AMD.
But mediatek’s wifi cards are a steaming pile of bovine excrement. Bluetooth issues, wifi dropouts, drivers not being mature until a year after the release.
Save your self the pain, buy an Intel wifi card for 20$ and upgrade it right after you bought the laptop. Might as well add RAM and storage. Takes an hour of work, 20 minutes of which is watching a YT video on how to do it.
35 of the remaining 40.is fucking with those tiny ass antenna connectors and wishing you’d never even bothered with the damn thing
It works well enough if you don’t mind the occasional disconnect and slow connection to wifi, which is true for a lot of people like me. It’s still pretty annoying to deal with sometimes, just not enough to go replace the WiFi card or anything.
until it gets completely fucked due to a form-over-function cooling system and hits 101C (NBLK-WAX9X)
Thermal pads might help.
…because HUAWEI doesn’t ship their laptops with thermal paste, apparently.
Power governor on balanced and somehow I’m at like 60c. Power governor on battery saving and it’s like 45c. Sometimes it cools passively. This is not sh1ntel.
my experience: power governor on balanced and somehow i’m at like 90c.
