I made the mistake of buying a used Thinkpad T420 and setting it up w/ Xubuntu as a fun fixer-upper side project. Now I'm way too used to it. It's my 1/2 daily driver (the other half a boring dell XPS desktop; Xubuntu) and I gave my much more capable MB Pro to my son, who uses it to watch YT videos and play games.
So far I keep finding workarounds for things that require too many system resources. It's been kind of a funny experience in that way. I really, really like that it's forced me to slow down and think.
It's a similar situation with my 2012 MSI Wind netbook, which runs Puppy Linux and is surprisingly capable with Falkon, Geany, Puppy utils, nim, Object Pascal, etc. I feel like I should be getting rid of this machine but it can really do a lot.
T420 Dislikes: It's heavy. The screen is terrible in terms of viewing angles. It doesn't show the color orange properly, so when I use it for graphics or illustrations, I have to check my work on other devices. The speaker volume isn't loud enough. The DVD drive randomly springs open every so often. I can't stand the way the trackpoint gets in my way when I go to type the B key. The literal LED lamp that shines onto the keyboard is annoying but at least it's there. There are 3 dead pixels.
This computer also dual-boots Windows 10 so I can run the sketchy software that has come with about 20 different Chinese ham radios. Thanks to the Chirp team for making this easier.
Right now I am using the Apple M1 air, which is nice, portable, quiet and has a decent battery performance.
All in all I am pretty happy with it. Of course if you can't stand Apple this is not the machine to get, but if you can deal with that it is a good way to get a Unix machine that you don't have to spend too much time setting up and most of time it works.
> I seriously overestimated my eyesight when I bought these.
Why's that? Not noticing a huge improvement of 1080 or 1440? I could personally live with 1080 forever, but running 4k on a 27in display gives me a little sense of glee with how crisp it is.
I use my work laptop, a dell latitude 7390 for most things. It's a great machine.
Other than that my personal laptop is a ThinkPad t440.
I like both, but frankly if the dell had the TrackPoint I'd throw my ThinkPad in the trash can and I would get an exactly equal machine for private use.
Solid laptop and great for travelling as small and light, thought docked mainly these COVID days.
Thinking of getting something with a bit more grunt next time. I seem to flip between better specs vs light each purchase or 2. Generally I've found lenovo to be most reliable.
2019 13” MBP w/the keys it seems everyone but me hates but that I really like, and the Touch Bar that I’m ambivalent about and won’t miss if it’s not in my next MBP.
Still have my 2014 15” MBP that’s still going strong, which is for personal use.
Increasingly, and surprisingly, M1 mini. Over a 2020 MBP and liquid-cooled i9 with 2080s.
I still do local Jupyter stuff on the i9, but... less and less as my clients are happier to have me spin up instances on AWS for dev work. Suits me fine. :)
Using an Acer Aspire 5 I bought in 2016. 5th gen i3, 15.6" screen, 8GB RAM, 1TB mechanical HDD. It works great with Linux and I haven't felt the need to upgrade.
A 2020 MacBook Pro, with the physical Esc key. I like it because it’s thin, lightweight, has a great screen, an awesome touchpad and a good keyboard. I kinda like the touch bar too now that I’m used to it.
my home desktop is a windows 10 machine with 64GB of RAM, 32 cores and a GPU. It's nice to be able to run servers and Cyberpunk at the same time- they don't bother each other, even though I've got a few renders going on in another window.
my server is a linux box that is 10 years old and still runs great.
i use a mini pc as my daily driver. the deskmini x300 with 5700g cpu/32gb of memory with 512gb nvme for boot.i sold my PC since i didn't use it as much as i thought and this mini pc CPU is even faster than the desktop one (ryzen 3800x)
+1 same here. I only really use a computer for work, and these days the three things I use are web browser, office suite, and ssh into a linux server. The 2017 still holds it's own, and suits my work very well - basically by having a browser without any memory / cpu issues, supporting MS office, and not annoying me every 10s with some kind or advertising or survey or notification as a windows machine does.
Ah, I had one of those! i7, 16gb RAM. I loved that computer, but I've spent the majority of the past year and a half at home and I found myself reaching for it less and less. A desktop just makes more sense for a home office (IMO). I did get an M1 MBA for the rare situations that I actually need to travel with a computer.
I handed it down to my fiancée who uses it to edit photos.
So far I keep finding workarounds for things that require too many system resources. It's been kind of a funny experience in that way. I really, really like that it's forced me to slow down and think.
It's a similar situation with my 2012 MSI Wind netbook, which runs Puppy Linux and is surprisingly capable with Falkon, Geany, Puppy utils, nim, Object Pascal, etc. I feel like I should be getting rid of this machine but it can really do a lot.
T420 Dislikes: It's heavy. The screen is terrible in terms of viewing angles. It doesn't show the color orange properly, so when I use it for graphics or illustrations, I have to check my work on other devices. The speaker volume isn't loud enough. The DVD drive randomly springs open every so often. I can't stand the way the trackpoint gets in my way when I go to type the B key. The literal LED lamp that shines onto the keyboard is annoying but at least it's there. There are 3 dead pixels.
This computer also dual-boots Windows 10 so I can run the sketchy software that has come with about 20 different Chinese ham radios. Thanks to the Chirp team for making this easier.