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Comment by progman | Hacker News Reader

Which ThinkPad models work flawlessly for you?

Not a high-end machine, but my wife recently got an x140e for peanuts (< $300 for the laptop during the XMas season sales, plus ~$150 to upgrade to an SSD + 8 GB RAM). She was upgrading from a Chromebook and decided that Linux fit her immediate use case better than Windows. My only guidance in this was, "plug in an ethernet cable during installation."

Every single piece of hardware--touchpad, sound, webcam, suspend, wifi, etc.--worked out of the box.

This machine is solidly built, and reasonably attractive. I'd say the thing that dropped the price was its weight. Functionally, it's easily a replacement for my MacBook Air or better. Physically, it's like three MacBook Airs stacked on top of each other.

Sorry, forgot to mention linux distro. She is running stock Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. Unity might get some hate from some segments, but seeing a novice user take to it with zero guidance was illuminating to me.

I recently bought a T420 for $300. After upgrading my ram to 8G and the stock hard drive to a samsung SSD, the laptop is easily a better overall laptop than my wife's MacBook Pro.

I'm running Ubuntu, although I may switch to Arch soon, but I haven't had any problems with drivers in Ubuntu and would imagine the same would go for Arch. So far, the only relative downsides compared to the MBP have been:

1) Battery life, although mostly fixed with TLP[a]

2) Keyboard quality...sometimes feels like some keys have more resistance than others

3) Screen contrast. My wife's MBP isn't a retina, but it still has much better resolution and contrast.

[a] http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-man...

I have a t420s, and replacing the DVD with a bay battery was a very worthwhile trade.

Do you have any links to these batteries? I'm very interested.

Try the keywords "ultrabay slim battery".

IIRC they only work with the T420s, not the T420. I might be wrong though, but Lenovo definitely removed the connectors that are required for that in some models of the T series at some point in time...

With the X220, you can get a beefy i7 full of ram quite cheap on ebay. Not as happy as with the X60, but the upgrade was worth it.

I'm currently running arch on an x240, and it works perfectly. I have also had really good experiences with x1 carbon (v2), x220 and x201.

I've ran several different distros on macbooks too, mostly flavours of debian/ubuntu, but also arch and gentoo. In my experience it's all about the amount of work you're willing to put in, but you can defenitely more often than not, get a good setup running on macs(least the machines I tried it on).

The silver lining of getting arch to run on a machine that's not really "plug and play" is that you get to learn a lot of it's internals during install. I would recommend it to anyone with an intrest in linux desktop systems :)

x240 here as well, except for (documented on the arch wiki) boot grub parameters for the acpi (brightness, suspend etc) it all works out of the box. Battery life with the extended 2 batteries is about 9 hours.

T530 here. Works flawless. Everything, from the function keys, to the webcam, to the fingerprint reader.

I've install Linux (typically Ubuntu) on an x60, x220, t400s, and now t530 and everything (except the fingerprint reader, which I don't care about) worked out of the box. Lenovo even mentions Linux in their material, which means a lot and is worthy of support.

Not all models are seamless in ThinkPad land. My X240 has Realtek wireless and it refused to work with any kernel earlier than 3.16 (Ubuntu < 14.10). Recognized on recent ones, but can't resume from Suspend.

Any X or T series with intel video tends to work pretty well. I've personally had great results with Ubuntu on a T410, T420, T520, T530, X1, X60 in the last few years.

I will add the X201 to that list. I have been using one, exclusively with linux, for the past 4 years.

I would remove the x201 from the list. It works fine with linux, but the TN screen is absolutely awful. The viewing angle is so narrow that even sited dead in front of it, I can't watch a video without some of the blacks looking wrong.

This comment was typed on my own 4-year-old x201 :)

If you're talking about the 1400x900 screen, I agree, the viewing sweet spot is nearly nonexistent. I actually swapped out the top shell of my X200s and so I could put in an AFFS panel.

(Running Mint 17.1, which broke the display popup for brightness, but curiously not for audio.)

I replaced the TN screen of my x201 with a Boe Hydis AFFS panel with IPS like viewing angles and contrast so I would _not_ remove it from the list. It's a great laptop and you can get them really cheap used (I've never bought a ThinkPad new so far).

I would remove it again, because if you don't already have an x201, you may as well buy an x220 instead of an x201 + replacement screen + labour (and the low risk you'll damage something in the swapover). You'll get slightly better specs in the deal. Looking on ebay now, x220s are only AU$100-200 more than x201s.

Anyway, if you're going to mod laptops to say that they're good, then many laptops will re-enter the fray :)

Have had the T40, T60, X60 and X220. Suspend many times per day. No issues ever, except with fans and hard disks dying on me. Built like tanks.

> Which ThinkPad models work flawlessly for you?

top of the line T models and some X models.

anything else is worse than the cheapest toshiba or acer.

if you doubt, buy yourself an E series for example. Lousy flimsy plastic quality, and all the corner cutting for costs that you find in an apple (like soldered RAM, devices changing bus based on what they found cheap on the market at that month, etc)

T61 on Xubuntu 14.10 working great! Like others though, there is always a 'but':

-correctly installed and configured Thinkfan to control fan speed. The default is a bit annoying.

Basically all of them. Linux loves thinkpads. I've personally run it on an old 770ED, T41P, T60, X301, and X1 Carbon flawlessly over decades.

I had, and all worked flawlessly: a X201s, a W520, and a Helix. I think that for a few weeks I even worked full-time on the X201s with Hackintosh.

I've not experienced any issues running Ubuntu (and Debian, as you'd expect) on both the T430 and the X230

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