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Comment by JeremyMorgan | Hacker News Reader

I love Lenovos, owned countless awesome thinkpads and I was teetering between a thinkpad and a System 76 for my next upgrade. This just seals it for me.

https://system76.com/

Great hardware for the price, comes with Ubuntu but you could easily put a good Linux system on there (ducks flying objects)

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System76 just rebrands Clevo laptops and installs Ubuntu on them, and host their own PPA to deal with system-specific drivers. In my experience, the laptops aren't any more linux-friendly than your average laptop (certainly less than your average Dell, or older Lenovo), it's just that you have, in theory, somebody else coming up with the hacks to get certain functionality to work, and pushing it to you as an update. Which is certainly something that many people might find appealing, but not everyone (especially those that like installing their own system).

Personally, I would just buy an old Thinkpad (see [0] for a great guide that was posted here a while ago) from before the time Lenovo became evil. I have an x201 that I rebuilt from cannibalised parts for less than $100 total (not including the SSD). An i5 and 6GB of RAM, 3 USB 3.0 ports added via ExpressCard and a 9 cell battery, all for 1/6 the cost of System76's new 'Lemur'. I have never experienced such wonderful Linux support out of the box. Although, you don't get a warranty :P

[0] http://ktgee.net/post/49423737148/thinkpad-guide

Edit: spelling

I have an old x201 that I need to upgrade. Can you share what ExpressCard you're using? Also, did you get a new 9cell? My own 9cell is at 77% tot. capacity and at 90eur for a new one, I'm not sure if it's worth investing in. Oh, and how much battery life are you getting under what distro/desktop? Cheers!

Oh, get a few of these[0]. They are pretty flimsy, but cheap (I've seen them for sale on eBay and various sites like aliexpress for ~20 euro-ish before. They sure hold a charge; I've had 9 hours of constant use before (of course, that was with a highly optimised Gentoo setup and mostly just coding without a graphical environment. I get 6 hours on average).

I don't know what expresscard I'm using, but it's an expresscard/54 that has 3 USB 3.0 ports. It's a generic Chinese card, and it works fine. Though, in order to use it to boot from USB you need install libreboot (there might be another way, I'm not sure).

[0] http://www.amazon.com/CBD-Hi-Capacity-Battery-ThinkPad-7800m...

I have never owned one myself, but potential buyers should be aware that these are Clevo rebrands, and there has been a lot of backlash about customer service, quality control, and just overall quality in general.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1xhtrj/what_are_your...

A few years ago I got a clevo barebone rebrand... it had everything I wanted hardware-wise but the keyboard was terrible.. (this was an i7-720 era machine - I guess that's the gen 1 of the current cpu rounds)

I'm afraid touchpads are a deal-killer for me. Are there any manufacturers other than Lenovo that do the nub-mouse or something similar?

There are some critical patents that Thinkpads use in their trackpoints that ought to be expiring soon:

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=...

Fuck patents.

Edit: But, thank you for the information.

I prefer to think that this means we'll be getting good pointers on not-Thinkpads in 2016 or 2017.

Some Dell business laptops and HP's older EliteBooks have touch pointers - though I seem to remember they're concave instead of convex (perhaps due to patents?).

I have an E6510 with a blue concave nub. The older D620 (pentium M) had a blue convex nub though.

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