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Comment by daviddaviddavid | Hacker News Reader

Lots of endorsers of Linux+Thinkpad. See my comment link below for my not-so-great experience running Ubuntu on an X220. I'll admit that I'm someone who just wants things to work (a mindset I probably owe to Apple).

tl;dr Fan spun constantly, machine ran hot, trackpad was basically non-functional. May just be X220-specific. Not sure.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428967

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I have an X220 with an i7 and have no issues with the touchpad although I use the trackpoint most of the time and it doesn't run particularly hot. I have verified that cpu throttling and fan control both work perfectly so you may have a configuration issue. I didn't do anything to explicitly make it work for me. The notes at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/X220 do mention that the touchpad is a bit shaky, so maybe that it what you seeing. Honestly I wish they made a Thinkpad without a touchpad at all. I much prefer the trackpoint which allows me to keep my fingers on the keyboard where they belong.

For a while I tried to use the Trackpoint exclusively. I love the position of it and I love the idea of having a very keyboard-centric setup. Ultimately, I stopped using it because I could never control the slight drift that happens when I'm trying to stop over something. I always seem to go past my destination and then have to navigate back. Maybe I'll give it another try.

As mentioned in linked comment, Ubuntu running in Virtualbox presented no problems at all and I'm happy with current setup.

I've noticed the same drift. To combat this I've developed a twitch, when drift starts my left thumb swipes the trackpad. This zeros the trackpoint and stops the drift.

The ThinkPad X40 and X60 series were TrackPoint-only.

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