Thinkpad X270 running 9front.
Thinkpad T410i running Debian.
Edit: Though I much much prefer to work on a desktop.
Thinkpad T410i running Debian.
Edit: Though I much much prefer to work on a desktop.
Personally I like the X200, X220, X230, ... series (as well as T400, T430, ...). One of the primary deciding factors is the quality of the keyboard.
P.S. What's it like to run 9front on a laptop? Is this a practical machine for getting the job done, or do you just want to learn about OS'es and experience the joy of Plan9? (I wanted to run Plan9 in the 1990's but was not yet open source at the time; plus computers were still expensive and finding a spare, compatible computer for a what would essentially be a hobby machine was out of the question.)
Running 9front is a pretty bare bones experience but a great OS learning experience. Plan 9 is "unix built on top of a network." I LOVE the simple design which distills everything down to files you read and write data to. Those files can then be shared over a network. Its wild and fun to think of your OS as a host for servers that multiplex resources transparently without machine boundaries. Fun example: IP lives in /net so you dont need NAT on a 9 lan. You simply import the internet facing /net and bind it over your local /net and now you are using the internet facing ip stack. Everything truly is a file.