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Comment by arianvanp | Hacker News Reader

I used my ThinkPad T430s for 12 years. I got it second hand from a developer I looked up to when I was in college and it carried me through a large part of my career. Loved that machine to death.

When I finally replaced it with a Framework a few years back I've regretted every second of it.

The ThinkPad still lives. I refurbished the batteries and slapped ChromeOS Flex on it and donated it to a Ukrainian refugee who needed a Chromebook for school. It'll probably live another 10 years.

I loved that thing to death. And I'm just happy it is still being used.

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I'm using my ThinkPad T520 daily driver right now.

With its non-chiclet keyboard, I type 12+ hours every day, never any discomfort.

Last year, I bought a late-model ThinkPad, to experimentally try replacing the T520. So I could have some local GPU compute, and not have to stockpile dwindling rare high-spec replacement units, in my minimalism lifestyle. But I haven't yet felt motivated to try out the new one, and see whether I can move to a not-as-good keyboard layout and a suspicious key action.

I loved my T430s. I swapped the keyboard out for a backlit one, and took out the DVD drive and replaced it with a hot swappable second battery. I was running Ubuntu MATE on it, it worked very well for me. The ThinkLight was also great.

I now have a second hand T480s which is also a wonderful machine, but not as amazing as that T430s. I gave my T430s to my mother who uses it to run software (albeit via Windows now) for her sewing machine.

I had the T431s for over a decade as well.

Replaced the keyboard (orange juice spillage), screen (upgraded to a higher resolution panel), hdd (to an SSD of course), RAM, Wifi adapter (Wifi 6) as well as the battery.

I now use an X1 Nano and while it's nice (and very light!) I am sad that the upgradability is nowhere near as good.

I still use my old T420, though less than I used to. Coincidentally, the RAM died this week, but a $30 investment later, and it lives again. At this point, I think I've repaired or replaced every single swappable component aside from the display.

I still have two 2013 era t430s, one with windows 7 and one with windows 10. When browsing the web they barely feel any slower than my corporate supplied t14 gen 2 or p1 gen 6 both with windows 11 now. I guess that’s the price of security.

I went through an odd series of emotions reading this lol.

ChromeOS made me throw up a bit but the recipient made me smile. May it serve them well.

It was a requirement from the school. Be happy they have one that makes it easy to flash another distro later! :D

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