I've been pondering doing something similar myself. If you don't mind my asking, which Lenovo did you get and which Linux variant does it seem to play nice with? :-)
T480s 3.5yrs old, out of warranty, ex-corporate cost me USD$430 running ubu 22.04 on a 4 core 8th gen core i5 & intel gfx is getting me 10 hours of battery life without having replaced the battery. (power settings set to Power Saver in the very obvious gui menu above shutdown). I did shove in more ram and a bigger ssd. Meh, 8G & 250G would have been enough fwiw. Gnome desktop is a thing I now find really polished and lovely to use.
In all it's just a beautiful thing I'm very, very happy with.
& Ebay. But it's also a very reasonable & justifiable decision to buy a new thinkpad imho. When it's a couple of years old the hardware support is usually perfect on first install - but I guess I don't use garbage like fingerprint readers so ymmv on that kind of silliness.
Thinkpads, T-Series, X1 carbon are the best laptops on the market by a good margin and have been there in that spot consistently for a long time. Buy apple if you really want/need to run apple software. I'd say just about /any/ distro will place nicely with the kernel-hackers laptop of choice. I'd bet fedora, rhel/centos, debian, arch would all be just terrific if you prefer one of those (and why not?)
I mean, x1 carbon (new) isn't much cheaper (in fact, more expensive, at the time of my googling) than a MacBook Air. The linux ecosystem (which I love) has it's own fair share of problems - gnome vs. KDE, deb vs. rpm, X vs. Wayland, pulseaudio vs. pipewire, systemd vs. (the world). Sure, installing ubuntu and not worrying about any of it is a great option, but I think you've painted a slightly too pretty picture :-)
(And, on your "kernel-hackers laptop of choice comment," it's curious that Linus released the last kernel from a MacBook device)
Gnome vs KDE isn't really a thing, deb vs rpm isn't a thing, X vs Wayland is only a temporary thing, Pulse vs PipeWire isn't a thing, PipeWire implements pulse apis.
systemd vs $INITSYSTEM is also temporary, though on a longer timescale. We need the old generation to die before systemd is accepted by everyone.
I don't mean to shit on your argument, but most things are either just preferences or progress that isn't done yet.
I'm about as bleeding-edge as can be (always latest stable kernel with xanmod patches) from NixOS, using Wayland and PipeWire.
The move to PipeWire made literally everything better for me (just works TM). While Wayland isn't perfect yet.
Gnome or KDE is a preference, it doesn't matter much and they're cooperating on many Wayland extensions.
systemd hate is either because you love the drama or you like bash scripts.
I don't particularly like either, so I like systemd.
A good thing people often forget with Wayland, PipeWire and systemd is that they are making our ecosystem a bit less fragmented, which I see as a great win, especially since I'm a NixOS user, my system relies heavily on systemd being declarative. My distro of choice wouldn't work as well (at all) without all "standards" (both real and implementation) that systemd and freedesktop puts forward.
Back on topic, the Linux desktop is honestly quite great if you constrain yourself a bit (Run a stable distro with boring tech, no Nvidia) or live on the bleeding edge where things also work well but might require more maintenance.
Lets be honest though, if I wasn't running NixOS I would probably run Ubuntu with whatever display and audio server they decided for me. And the package manager would be apt, brew, nix or flatpak depending on application. (Now it's Nix and Flatpak only).
Fair points, though I don't share your enthusiasm about wayland/pipewire transitions being "temporary." The fragmentation that Wayland has caused will be difficult to recover from - I think many older WM's will just die off. I generally agree that less fragmentation is good, though, so hopeful that desktop linux emerges stronger. But, having used it full time for the last ~15 years, it feels less focused than ever. Perhaps I too should transition to something like ubuntu, and just not worry about any of it :D
>Perhaps I too should transition to something like ubuntu, and just not worry about any of it :D
Something like this (fedora, debian are fine, I've heard arch is fine, no doubt others also) is the /only/ fair approach in comparison it to an apple or windows laptop. It's the only approach _possible_ with microsoft & apple.
Doing fun stuff like re-writing the default kernel scheduler and putting a bug in there on linux is really just not a point against linux in any way when you can (a) choose not to do that and (b) can't choose that at all with windows. Apple? Does anyone compile their own laptop kernel on apple? Common enough on linux because you can make your use as complicated as suits you in all the ways you can't on windows and apple...
It is true that apple sysadmin gets super complicated and hard with the answer usually boiling down to something not far away from: "you can't do what you want even if it used to work fine and you paid apple for the privilege. But you can pay apple an ever bigger subscription to do something related the way they want and stop complaining, apple is so user-friendly! Apple knows best. Freedom is tyranny."
I mourn the death of the Nokia N900. I hope for the oncoming pine phone & pine time revolution because Apple really are every bit as foul as Google. These things aren't yet easy the way laptops really are now.
I'm on NixOS atm, but I've been considering going Ansible+btrfs on some rolling release distro instead, the declarative approach is cool but hard when you're off the beaten path!
For PipeWire I'd say we're already there, it just works better than pulse when doing pulse things, and they also implement JACK and ALSA if you need them.
Regarding Wayland, yes a lot of old DE's and WM's will die, but that's just the way of nature, there are still many great options for people to use, we must deprecate things eventually.
Wayland impressions so far: Annoying that windows can't take focus, annoying that electron doesn't default to it yet, TouchPad input works better, scaling works better.
Some apps (vscode) shows a generic icon in Wayland rather than vscode.
Remember that you can run XWayland on Wayland. XWayland will keep most X11 apps working just the same, and X11 really needs depreciation. I'm almost most excited about "Waypipe". When it's mature enough it'll run circles around X11 forwarding while being performant and secure!
I mean I realize how I've turned into one of those "you just have to do these easy things to make it work" kind of people, but for "dumb usersč on "good hardware" (Linux compatible) it's really quite nice, my father had less issues on Linux Mint than Windows.
The year of the Linux desktop is here, it's just wrapped into a VM (crosvm) or a gaming console (SteamDeck/SteamOS).
Honestly with a bit more customization options, and no tracking I would probably get a Chromebook as the next machine (They run Android and "Linux" apps now)
With Waydroid or Anbox you can run Android apps on Linux too, but last I tried wasn't great.
Progress is being made on the shittiest of fronts too! NVIDIA moving code from the driver into firmware is "great" from a usability perspective, I don't really care enough about FLOSS to demand my GPU implementation details being open, as long as compatibility is good.
Huh? We've been asked for our experience and that was mine. I feel strongly that if I were using fedora or debian that experience would be strikingly similar.
Gnome vs kde (and there's /plenty/ of other options) is a choice, make it. Done. No further issues. And as a happy gnome guy I'm very sure KDE is excellent and will serve well.
deb vs rpm. That choice is made when you choose your distro, never to be revisited or cared about again. Likewise pulseaudio, systemd are chosen when you chose your desktop and distro respectively and you don't have to think about them on your laptop again. X vs Wayland - whatever comes with your distro you use if you're even aware of it.
But yes you can complicate it all as much as suits you if you have the need or want to do so which you basically can't with apple, so... And your knowledge then translates to the pi or other SBC so that's pretty cool too. And to your servers or ones you work with for money. This is not a negative imho.
Go to any kernel conference and you'll see all kinds of laptops for sure, some hilariously eccentric. Linus used a mac 15 years ago too (powerpc iirc). Yet you'll see Thinkpads are always, clearly and obviously the most commonly used by a large margin unless things have changed dramatically during pandemic times, which I kind of doubt.
Anyway I bought a T480s second hand for peanuts, dumped ubu on it and have been contemplating its beauty and utility since. Apple gear is a _much_ bigger sysadmin headache for me (and it isn't close) but might be less so for you if that's what you know and understand. This is /my/ experience of it.
Linux on the laptop in 2022 is flipping great. Shhhhh, don't tell.
I think ThinkPads are so commonly used because they're durable, but most of all, because their keyboards are probably one of the best among any laptops.
I can vouch for Linux in laptops, I've been running Debian+xfce (recently switched to Debian+lxde, for maybe slightly less ram usage) on my Acer Aspire One for probably more then 10 years now! It's my go-to machine whenever any hardware needs testing, be it networking or just a printer.
Sorry for the very late reply, but thank you so much! I'm very glad to hear you have a machine (and OS) that you are happy with. I'll definitely check it out for myself!
Ideapad 5 pro with an AMD proc. it's the 14" variant. I am not near it right now, so I can't give you specifically what model. Got it on sale at Costco. Running Pop_os. The newer Linux kernels have support of amd_pastate so battery life is good.
Previous Mac was a 13" Macbook Pro if anyone is keeping score. Loved it, but just didn't want or need something that expensive.
