Lenovo ThinkPad T470s

I still use my T470S as a Ubuntu 22.04 development machine. I bought it from my pre-pre-company as a used one back in 2022 and it is a fantastic laptop for personal projects. The only update I did was a 16GB RAM to up the memory to 20GB. I also bought a new battery as one of the two was dead. I wish the graphic driver could be better as playing Youtube videos constantly crashes Firefox on Ubuntu. Other than that I have nothing to complain. I have been using it for 3+ years with zero maintenance (I didn't even bother to clean the fan) and it never failed me. I have a second "new" Dell workstation laptop standing by just in case it breaks down. But it is a Windows machine with 32GB of memory, so I'll probably use WSL2 instead.

That's exactly what I did, an old ThinkPad t470s. I installed NixOS, and then I copied /etc/nixos down to my main workstation where I had claude code working, and used it to modify the configs. I'd then rsync them to the other machine and run the "nixos-rebuild" there. I don't recall exactly how I did the initial copies, because SSH wasn't set up there. Probably would be best to just ask claude what needs to be done to enable SSH, it's only like a 1 line change. Some of the first things I asked it to do were: - Switch to flakes and tracking the latest software. - Switch to using Sway for window manager. - Various user account setup things: Configure zsh with atuin and zoxide, enable sudo, allow my SSH key for login, set up some aliases and the software I need. - Install claude code (I gave it the "installing" URL) once I got tired of copying back and forth. - Set up Home Manager and SOPS and put my secrets in SOPS, set up a variety of my scripts and symlinks. - Configure vim to my liking (done entirely in English prose). Those are the top things that come to mind. Honestly, it went pretty smoothly. The only real issue I had to speak of was that I'm running bleeding edge, and the moment I decided to unplug my desktop monitors from the Ubuntu machine and connect them to NixOS I had it do a package update at the same time. This hit a Gnome+Wayland bug which left me at a black screen. A nice thing about NixOS is you can just reboot and at the gr…

you will NEVER understand it fully.... for you t460 is just a webserver, while for me t470s is my state of the art sole machine... IMO youu undervalue the magic and robustness of those laptops.

This is great. I’m still rocking a nearly 10 year old T470s. Great machine with Linux on it, still snappy enough- Tailscale is there when I need to do serious work (on my desktop at home!) I replaced the batteries a few months ago and it was painless.

I got my first Dell laptop, the XPS15, 5 years ago. Prior to that I had a good 25 years as a Thinkpad die-hard. The XPS has been ... ok. I've had some issues with it resetting for no apparent reason over its life. Frequency varies, but sometimes it'll just blank the screens and then the BIOS comes up on the display, a few times a week, then it'll be good for a month or more. I had one issue where I needed to ship it back: it would reset and then it was running off the battery, and no matter what port I plugged a charger/docking station into it wouldn't charge until I powered it off and back on again. I got them to do a replacement under warranty a couple years ago. Around a month ago it was doing the reset fairly frequently and then wouldn't power on sometimes, and I noticed the wrist rest was a little bowed. I replaced the battery pack (kind of a pain, but not the worst I've done), and it was good for around a month, but now it has that "won't charge the battery" issue again. I believe when they did the previous repair they replaced the motherboard, but now I'm out of warranty. For my next laptop I kind of want a Framework, so I can replace the mobo if I need to. My work likes us to replace hardware no more frequently than every 5-6 years, but we get a warranty for way less than that (my laptop I pushed to get a 4 year). Meanwhile my previous Thinkpad T470s is still going strong, though the screen just developed a line through it. That's ~10 year old now. My person

I used a MacBook, first Air and then Pro until 2018. Then I switched to ThinkPad because I had sold my MacBook pro 2015 and needed a new laptop. And the new MacBooks were not to my taste. The Thinkpad was fantastic. T470s, took care of all my needs, lots of ports, upgradeable RAM und SSD. Recently I upgraded to a Ryzen-based Dell but it is hot and loud. I am considering going back to MacBook depending on what they release next.

I'm very happy with my ThinkPad. A T470s, to be precise. It's light but sturdy, has a great keyboard and has a decent amount of ports for such a small laptop. All of the hardware is well supported under Linux, except for the fingerprint reader. The only gripe I have with it is the fact that the screen is a little dim (only 250 nits).

Do you not feel limited by the CPU? I had a Macbook Air with a 4th gen Core i5 and at times it was really slow just for day to day browsing. Maybe that was just thermal throttling though. Now I've switched to a T470s which seems a good trade off between size, connectivity and performance. It's roughly the same size as my Macbook Air (13", 2014) but a little lighter, and has ports for HDMI, Ethernet, USB 3.0 x3, audio, USB-C/TB3 and dock connector. I only get maybe 6 hours on the battery which is a bit disappointing though...

I got an x220 jumping onto the hype but it was too small and too slow to use. Even though I'd maxed out the RAM, replaced the solder paste and was running a lightweight i3 environment. I've only ever personally owned second hand Thinkpads and they're so great. But you should get the newest, reasonably priced one you can. There are so many affordable T480s/T470s out there or even the newer T14 models. They're still very serviceable and many still allow expansion with unsoldered RAM.