I would tend to agree with John, look at getting a a new or second hand
Thinkpad, I have an old single core R51 (proper IBM 2006 vintage) which
I upgraded with a new battery and some more memory, for less than £80,
it runs AntiX without issue. The other Thinkpad is a T530 (IBM designed
badged Lenovo), this is my main machine, added 8GB to make 16GB memory,
swapped out the hard disk for 500GB SSD, picked up a full docking
station from ebay, quite happily runs two 24" screen plus the laptop
screen and runs Linux Mint XFCE
Hope it helps
Tim H
On 20/09/2022 18:42, John Carlyle-Clarke wrote:
On Tue, 20 Sept 2022 at 18:14, Hugh Frater<hugh.fra...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 20 Sep 2022 at 18:26, Peter Merchant<petermerch...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
A friend of mine is wanting a new laptop and asked if I would post his
request here - Yes he uses Linux.
Does anybody know of a good source for him?
I've always seen refurbished Thinkpads come up whenever this is
discussed. I had a new X1 Carbon at my previous job and it was a
lovely machine: everything worked well on it with Linux. When I wanted
a Linux laptop recently I looked at them and there's a big range of
specs, conditions and prices. In the end I splurged on a new XPS 13
though.
FWIW I’ve never had much luck getting fingerprint readers to work on my
laptops when dual booting - the current Machine (asus g14) is no
exception. Everything else works fine though.
I do remember the fingerprint sensor as being the only thing that
wouldn't work on the Thinkpad initially. I think it would read with
Linux but you needed Windows to train it. At some point that changed
and I got it working properly.
I've looked at Linux built laptops including Dell and all seem to be
overpriced compared to popular Windows orientated companies.
I think it's a case of "you get what you pay for" to some extent but
the machines that are sold as supporting Linux like Dells and
Thinkpads do tend to be aimed at software devs and therefore in a
price bracket alongside Macs. It would be nice if more of the
mid-range machines were also sold as Linux compatible (since many of
them are to a large extent).
The XPS was £1100 but it's a top spec little machine. Definitely the
most I ever spent on a laptop (or any other computer come to that) but
I can't fault it.
The only thing I haven't tried to set up yet is the fingerprint
sensor! But that's pure laziness (I found I rarely used it)
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