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Comment by sigio | Hacker News Reader

New old stock Thinkpad T480's ;) Should be around 600-700

Though it seems they might be harder to find these days.

This also looks more then decent: https://outlet.bluelink.nl/product/20HJS0XA07?path=NOTEBOOK/

Thinkpad T480S is not as good as it seems. It has throttling issues with linux. Besides that, the trackpad starts to flaking after some usage. I totally not recommend this laptop.

I have a T480 and it's great. I run Pop!_OS on it and have no complaints. The fingerprint reader was the only thing that didn't work out of the box, but that can be fixed too.

Got a even cheaper E495 (Ryzen3!) for EUR 450, and upgraded to 16GB RAM. Much better than my old desktop i5 PC. 1TB HD, better than a 256GB SSD imho

Seconded, it's a good machine and everything works well with linux.

Very interesting. I will definitely check it out.

Note that the P51 is a mobile workstation, not a "laptop". I have a P50 which is the same hardware platform from the previous year; powerful stuff - but not something you want to have in your bag to commute with. Also the battery life is not that great (it is a "full power" processor, not a mobile one), so even the "in meetings for most of the day" use case is not appropriate; it uses a brick power supply that you don't want to carry around either. The T4__(s) and X are great laptops - (Except for couple of X1s that were too ambitious footprint-wise or which tried too hard to implement "edgy but bad" features (touchbar)).

T440s - love it. Apart from a few problems. It won't shutdown properly but restarts every time. And if I leave it unplugged and the battery dies, I have to open the back and disconnect/reconnect both batteries to power it on again. Also the touchpad is a pain - can't use the trackpoint because there are no buttons at the top of the trackpad, to click you have to press the trackpad down far too much. Still, even with these problems it's a handsome machine and surprisingly capable of running intensive programs (Blender, Adobe Animate, Krita)

Thanks for the heads up. I was wondering about the Quadro as well, since I know that NVIDIA and Linux do not play nicely at all.

I use the Nvidia card on my P50 with Linux (Mint) and the results are... OK. The biggest problem is that when it resumes from suspend, about 50% of the time it forgets that there are external monitors connected. Sometimes it forgets both (falling back to the laptop panel), sometimes it forgets one or the other. Sometimes it enables both, but forgets to apply the rotation, so the positioning is all weird. I have to re-enable and re-position both external monitors, and then move all my windows around to where they're supposed to be.

I think the answer is likely, "it depends." I too have a P50, and mostly leave it with the integrated Intel graphics. The Nvidia is needed for HDMI output though.

In any case, I do fire that up when needed, with its own X session.

Battery is quite variable, but can be decent, depending on what you're doing. I use i3wm on mine, and powertop will show configuration settings that are non-optimal, as well as power-hog applications.

They aren't too great if your job is compiling all day, otherwise I mostly agree.

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