They generally have really great linux support for all of their hardware (touchpads, fingerprint readers, etc.), and provide bios updates via fwdup. They are also just nice laptops.
Yeah back when it was IBM before they sold off to Lenovo. Back when their biggest selling point was their priority was keeping you up & running and getting work done. Nowadays nearly all the products are made with the priority “So, how do we design this so the user will have to pay for it multiple times?”
you can't get a framework for 20€ on ebay tho + old thinkpads (older laptops in general) are just way robuster and have better build quality in general
ThinkPads are business machines and those are extremely repairable compared to consumer machines. Even my shitty Dell precision has instructions on how to disassemble it etched onto the mainboard. And since business laptops get dumped after a few years of relatively light use (many are de facto stationary), you can get pretty good machines for very cheap.
ThinkPads are just very popular, because they are consistently pretty good and don't stand in your way softwarewise, which isn't always true for Dell or HP machines.
makes me think of the good ol't times when the air was cleaner, roads were safer and our bosses used to pay us in Thinkpads, not this "fiat money" nonsense.
I mean, work in a tech field and have good relations with people who manage hardware, you'll get to keep some that goes to garbage then, you'll be surprised how much fairly recent hardware is thrown out by companies
I already do, and most hardware in the office are macbooks, toshibas, and dells. Also, it’s no longer as common for companies to allow employees to buy/adopt old hardware and they choose to recycle instead.
I'm a gnu/linux noob. I recently installed Pop OS on two older laptops. Am loving it so far. Going to work on getting games functioning on one of them next.
Was blown away when the built-in Disks program was able to easily fix a couple of thumb drives I have that were suffering from logical corruption. They were completely unusable in Windows 11. I tried 4 different methods in Windows 11 to fix them, with zero luck. Disks fixed them in 2 clicks. They are nicer thumb drives and were somewhat expensive. I am very happy to have them back.
Due to no mousepad I would recommend installing a tiling wm like sway (forgot to mention I use a Thinkpad, yes I know about the nipple. But consider the extremely high quality keyboard).