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Comment by valarauca1 | Hacker News Reader

I currently use a very cheap read ~250 dollar lenovo laptop. Running Ubuntu. Its default power settings are great, at light usage I can easily go a day or two without a charge.

Close lid + suspend works perfectly. I think I've booked about 2-3 months of it being continuously on. On open I get a black screen that states system resuming, then a login prompt not 1-2 seconds later (and I hear my hard drive begin to spin again).

Perfectly fluid, I'm honestly afraid to move away from unity, lest I lose this feature.

The only issue I have is since upgrading to FireFox 28.0.1 it sometimes crashes when it resumes. I've sent several reports to mozilla. I think the issue is flash.

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Wow, we're pretty similar. I've been using Thinkpad T40, T41 and T42 laptops running Ubuntu for the past 8 years or so. Everything works hardware-wise. If you trash it, you're not out thousands or stuck waiting for a depot repair for a week. You're out the $100-$200 you paid for a spare and the time it takes to move the hard drive caddy over.

The amount of stuff I've built on a hundred dollar laptop over the years...definitely a lesson in there about making do and getting stuff done. If you're a student, living in an emerging country, or someone who beats up their laptop regularly via field work: give an old Thinkpad a shot.

A couple weeks ago, though, I broke my monastic vows and got one of the new Thinkpad X1 Carbons. It's got the 2560x1440 IPS display, 4 cores, and an SSD. Definitely a big step up, although the jury's still out on whether it's all worth it. As usual with new laptops and Linux, suspend-resume doesn't work yet. Also none of the Linux desktops I've tried have any idea what to do with a high density display yet, so I'm running at a lower resolution for now. :/ Supposedly the next Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release will have high dpi support [1].

[1] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/02/ubuntu-14-04-high-resolut...

I'm still using an IBM thinkpad r31. I'd claim it was cheap but the 2 battery replaces I've done to keep it fully functioning isn't cheap.

At some point I need to get around to upgrading it [1]. I'm kinda attached to it, and I'm really afraid that something will break.

http://i.imgur.com/12bR0GP.jpg

Batteries: you're right, they're not cheap. For the T4x's I would buy a 9-cell lion for ~ $100. Almost the price of the laptop!

"Afraid that something will break" -- FWIW, I've replaced almost every FRU in those old Thinkpads at one point or another, and find them really easy to repair compared to other brands. But an R31, that's getting pretty up there in years. It's probably getting hard to find a spare for parts, let alone a relatively unused one that's got some years left in it as a backup machine.

Software breaking!

Upgrading from kernel 2.4 to 3.10 won't be easy I think.

What exact model of Lenovo do you have? I got a Thinkpad x140e in the configuration certified by Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201309-14195/

It has been a nightmare.

Bluetooth doesn't work. Changing screen brightness doesn't work. X crashes on startup. Even Ubuntu's GUI installer crashes on startup. Suspend works, but I can only resume by opening the lid, not by typing or clicking. Also, once I resume, focus is often on the last app, not the password input. The first time this happened, I typed my password. No effect. Confused, I clicked on the password input and tried again. Success, but my terminal said, "*K&GD#TYIBO(" command not found. That means anyone can run a command as my user simply by typing it at the password prompt. For some reason this only happens when resuming from suspend, not after locking the screen.

I have a mostly-working system today. Brightness is still stuck at maximum, limiting the battery to 6 hours. (Windows 8 gets 9 hours.) The latest beta Catalyst drivers fix X crashing, but I still get screen tearing so watching video is extremely annoying. Bluetooth no longer crashes, but it can't see any discoverable devices or pair with them. Wifi transfers at 802.11n speeds once I compile the latest drivers.

I thought I'd picked a good laptop to run Linux on, but it turns out that Ubuntu's hardware certification is worthless. It's so frustrating, because once you max-out the RAM and install an SSD, the x140e just needs working drivers.

I have an x230 and use fedora and literally everything worked out of the box and was quicker than windows by a long shot. I was just installing fedora for a dev environment, but quickly switched away from windows because it was so much better.

I don't have a think pad https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7459325

I'm sorry if this is obvious to you, but your post makes it sound like you may have bought a laptop in the configuration listed and then tried to install Ubuntu. Quoting from the Ubuntu website you linked,

    Standard images of Ubuntu may not work at all on the
    system or may not work well, though Canonical and
    computer manufacturers will try to certify the system
    with future standard releases of Ubuntu.

Did you use a standard Ubuntu image, or get one pre-installed?

I used the standard Ubuntu image. I tried 12.04LTS, 13.10, and 14.04LTS alpha/beta/whatever.

I'm not sure it's possible to buy an x140e with Ubuntu preinstalled. When purchasing from Lenovo's website, the OS choices are all versions of Windows 7 and 8. It would be nice if this potentially modified version of Ubuntu was released somewhere.

I had some issues with Flash too. I found re-installing it fixed things for me. Maybe try:

    sudo apt-get purge flashplugin-installer
    sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

and see if it helps.

I will give this a shot over lunch and report back.

Couldn't reproduce the bug after 2 attempts with youtube opened. Considered it fixed after this.

Also make sure that you're not holding an old .adobe directory in your home with an old version of flash hiding in it.

Flash is the worst thing for my Linux system stability.

Rather than purging and re-installing, have you considered just updating?

`sudo update-flashplugin-nonfree --install`

This command works on debian based systems (as far as I know) and I typically prefer it in place of using apt, since your distribution's repos may not have the most current version (Debian Wheezy, for example).

Which model?

G750 http://www.cnet.com/products/lenovo-essential-g570/

Not bad. The case is plastic and very cheap. Repeat usage will break the case around the hinges, which I find is an annoyance, but doesn't actually harm its functionality.

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