Get a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th gen with Arch Linux or Fedora. Forget CentOS.
I will never ever buy a Lenovo. It doesn't matter that it didn't affect the ThinkPad line.
Which tbf Lenovo cocked up a couple of weeks ago and hosed the SSD firmware so it didn't boot. Luckily i'm not a moron so everything was backed up, they sent a new SSD and they picked up the old one to recover, which I assume will be a hardware firmware flash. I don't need the backup, but I am looking forward to Lenovo spending the money for the pickup/flash/delivery to make sure it costs them as much money as possible so they don't do this again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/943m9o/x1c6_ssd_f...
How about we stick to the facts we know, which is that all manufacturers but Apple have done these incredibly user hostile things.
With the amount of attention on them, if they did it, it’s bound to come out sooner or later.
Until then, though..
But I think the real culprit is that all of the organizations the grandparent poster listed distribute proprietary software which is untrustworthy to begin with. Proprietary malware isn't hard to find (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for an organized set of links) whether it came with the OS pre-installed on the computer or installed later. So long as it adversely affects the user and leaves the user with no permission to inspect, alter, and share the software (only permission to run the malware) the situation is bad.
Clevo. They are a whitebox laptop manufacturer so you will find they are OEM for several smaller brands like MSI, Sager, and others. Yes they are Chinese market, but every laptop is made in China these days, even the big American names, so that part is unavoidable. If that truly is an issue you can't get around, you'll be happy to know that System76 is moving towards producing its devices in house in the United States[1], though I have no idea if the recent tariff wars have affected that situation.
[1] https://opensource.com/article/18/4/system76-us-manufacturin...
https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2017/07/openbsd-and-modern-laptop...
Zbooks seem to continue the tradition. Dell's Precisions are great, too.
Haven't had experience with the newer Thinkpads, the design, materials and being owned by a Chinese megacorp kind of drove me away.
0) https://www.macrumors.com/2017/02/09/icloud-storing-deleted-...
Can you explain more?
1) You can find a couple of threads where people either say Wistron makes Lenovo Thinkpads, and even one where someone finds the Wistron name on a X1 Carbon box they were shipped: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/x1-carbon-shipping-t...
2) Wistron is a spinoff of Acer. Specifically the Manufacturing/R&D wing of Acer. However, that spinoff happened in 2000, so there really isn't a connection between Acer and Wistron anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wistron
This is a nice 2009 article about Wistron: https://www.forbes.com/global/2009/1214/technology-wistron-s...
If you have a larger tinfoil hat you can always libreboot an x220.
Running old Linux versions on new laptops is going to be a frustrating experience; ideally all the device drivers you need are mainlined into the kernel of your distribution so you won't have to mess with those yourself.
If you like Red Hat stuff (which I do), install Fedora 28. It's on my Thinkpad right now, and works flawless.
It's hard to really recommend the X1 (or T480s) as a developer machine, IMO.
Thank god for strong EU consumer laws that I got my money back.
Also the fact Lenovo refuse to offer an option to switch between S3 and S0i3 sleep in the BIOS is very frustrating on a business laptop. They only support S0i3 which doesn't even play well with Microsoft's own Modern Standby so is almost pointless for me. Almost daily I would open my bag up to a super hot laptop and almost zero battery as it didn't actually go to sleep like expected.
Only issue is battery life, maybe 4-7 hours with VSCode, Slack etc, but maybe you can’t complain too much given these are electron apps.
It certainly was the best I worked with until two years ago, for several years. Sure, it’s got its quirks, but they help you a lot to learn new stuff, and after that, it’s much easier to set it up again in case you needed (I only needed it once every two years or so).
It's also surprisingly stable.
I think a higher bar to entry often keeps things better quality (coming from the dev world I am thinking about Django deployment versus PHP deployment). Arch was too much of a pain for me to install last time I checked, and its going to be way too much effort for anyone relatively new to Linux.
Don't get me wrong, technically you can make Ubuntu just as flexible but you have to try to configure it that way. All the conveniences they brought into these distros for simple package management actually sets you up for failure when you are doing larger upgrades. Not to mention that the packages in their repos are often out of date.
I never had my Arch box fail me across upgrades, allowing me to actually be current in the code I run.
It's a healthy middle between Gentoo and CentOS if you don't want to build it all from source but yet still be current.
Even opkg and some IPAs are better than the package manager experience I had with apt-get or yum/dnf.
And despite the name, it's pretty solid, I don't remember the last issue I had with it.
With luck it will be less than $1M/yr.
This is why people don't use homebrew anymore, either. If you're running a Mac you dev in a Docker container that reflects your production environment.
That doesn't mean they're developing against Arch.
fun fact. Fedora is what RedHat uses to test and flesh out all the fancy features coming in CentOS 8 & RHEL 8. I think Fedora 25 or 26 is what those OSs are being build from.
Oh I didn’t know that. Will look into that!