Lenovo ThinkPad T60

I find this surprising as well - I love my Lenovos. Six years ago I had a Thinkpad T60 and loved it to death. It is still going strong after six years (although it did need a fan replacement after five). I'm currently on an Edge 420 and it is a pretty nice machine. Not as nice as their business lines (T series, W series) but a killer bargain for the price - especially because I got a refurb from their outlet. Basically, I'm going to buy Lenovo for the rest of my life if I can.

I first experimented with Linux around 2001-2003 (kernel 2.4.x). I tried many of the popular distributions at the time (RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, SuSE), but concluded that while it was useful as a server if you set it up carefully, it really wasn't ready for the Desktop. In particular, I had issues with hardware support (graphics and USB), unreliable filesystems (ext2 after a crash), browser compatibility, video playback, office suite compatibility, and anti-aliased text. I made the switch from Windows XP to Mac OS X around the same time, and for several years it filled the role of a "usable desktop unix" OS quite well. A few years later (2005?) I put Ubuntu on some spare hardware I had lying around and ended up keeping it as a personal server for the next five years or so. My last Mac laptop (MBP, 2 GHz core duo, Leopard) died around 2010. I had originally planned to get a new Mac at the end of that summer, but in the meantime I put the latest Ubuntu on an old Thinkpad my dad had lying around (T60, 1.83 GHz core duo). It ran circles around my old Mac despite the slightly slower CPU, and many of the issues I had with Linux the first time around had been solved. I was impressed enough to skip the Mac upgrade and continued using the T60 for the next two years. I was happy enough with Linux by then that I knew I wasn't going back to OS X, but some personal issues with the Ubuntu upgrade cycle and where Canonical was headed eventually led me to switch to a rolling rele

My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.

There's two of us. Stock T60 (3Gb ram, 320Gb mechanical hard drive, stock BIOS) with Slackware64 -current. Nice keyboard as you say. These things are solid .

T60 user here - just upgraded the CPU to a T7400 C2D, added an SSD and increased the RAM to 4Gb (3.25 or so usable thanks to Libreboot). It's actually still quite usable. I'm currently running Exe GNU/Linux for a modern yet retro look (Trinity DE), and the 4:3 screen and decent keyboard really make it.

The first-gen macbook shared a lot of internals with certain Dell laptops of the era. In 2010 I was homeless and attending high school at a boarding school and didn't have nice macbooks like my classmates, but I cobbled together my first laptop that summer from a few different old salvaged Dell models. Dual-booting into a hackintosh was a breeze. I eventually salvaged an old T60 and it was a similar case, enough crossover in components that it wasn't any trouble running macOS. This was in an era where you wanted Apple software even on non-Apple hardware. Today, it's the opposite.

To be fair, 32 bit machines just can’t do (good) ASLR. That doesn’t stop me from using my 20 year old thinkpad t60s for specific projects, though.

Best laptop I ever owned was T60, I wish someone made exactly same model with modern cpu.

My qualms with modern Thinkpads are as follows: No SD card slot (standard on many MacBooks so it's not like it's a niche feature) BIOS always displays at max brightness no matter what, blinding you when you're up too late, and always beeps when you go into boot selector or bios options, even if you have beeps disabled. Overall, compared to golden age ThinkPads like my old T60, T420,x230t, the BIOS is very uncomfy, which matters if you like to play with operating systems. The trackpads get disgusting so quickly, even if you washed your hands like 10 minutes ago. You cannot keep those things clean, they're like this, cheap soft plasticky material... Could do a lot better in this area. That weird little camera lip thing they're doing might be the ugliest thing I've ever seen on a laptop Some of them have the fans exhaust on the right side, so if you try playing a video game on them with a mouse it will make your hand uncomfortable.

Debian has been amazing for my fleet of geriatric ThinkPads… my T60 and X200 are my favorites to use.

Indeed, the classic keyboards rock! I have a T43 and T60 and both are lovely to type on. I've never tried the X220 keyboard but I imagine it's similar. However, despite the flak island keyboards received, I really like the X230 keyboard. It feels fast, accurate, and responsive. Plenty of travel, and I enjoy the backlight.

I also use and love Thinkpads as dedicated GNU/Linux machines. I have a T60 running Arch Linux, an X301 running Arch Linux, and a X30 running Debian. All work marvelously despite being >10 years old in some cases. I do Android development on the X301 which I upgraded to 8GB of RAM. My only gripe with any of my Thinkpads is that their processors are under-powered by modern standards but you won't notice unless you are compiling something large, running an emulator, or running something virtualized. The best part is the price, I paid 40USD for my X301 and have had no issues for years.

Thinkpad (T60) has a great keyboard, good feedback. I don't use the mousepad, I like the little red pointer thingy it has and has 1400x1050 resolution display. It also a mate display (not the glare type). It is bulkier than other laptops and by now its processor is behind the latest i7 and i5's. Also as soon as I got I installed Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu lets me re-map caps lock to a control for my emacs usage. And most of all this machine has worked great for many years . It has traveled with me, has been banged up, dropped, had hot liquids spilled on it and it still works.

I've used a T60 with Linux installed for several years as my laptop, and I love it. I ended up with two RMAs (CPU fan died and screen had some sort of display issue), but the third has been a trooper with no issues.

I've got a post-Lenovo Thinkpad (T60) - and it's been pretty solid for me. (At least as solid as my T30 / T43)

I've been using linux exclusively for about 10 years and I can sympathize with your experiences. However, in the last three years I've installed linux on two laptops for work - a Dell Inspiron at my previous job and a Lenovo T60 at my current job. In both cases, installation was flawless, hardware was autodetected correctly, and everything "Just Worked". That includes OpenGL, audio, and wireless. For reference, I'm using Ubuntu. In the last couple of years, linux installations have become much, much better in this respect. I'm sure that people running bleeding edge hardware or using certain components still struggle to make it work with linux. However, the need to compile drivers and fix issues caused by updates is no longer a guarantee when runnig linux.

I used a PowerBook Ti 3.5 1Ghz for 4 years and I loved it. But since most of my programming is in java (whatever), I _had_ to switch. The last year I simply run ubuntu-ppc. IMO: The best of apple laptops: (1) long battery life, (2) bright screens, (3) very comfortable keyboards -if you remap the apple keys to control. The worst of apple laptops: (1) they get burning hot -even new macbook pros; (2) the spinning beachball (of death) can get to your nerves -too much swapping; (3) their sharp edge will hurt your wrists -as opposed to a smoothened, curvy Thinkpad T60 (my current).

Yeah, I know about them. They look like MacBooks, and I really think the old ThinkPad design from the Yamato was perfect. I also miss the trackpad, as I'm a heavy keyboard user. If there were an option to fund a clone of an IBM-era T43/T60, I'd gladly contribute to it. :D Thanks anyway for your help!

People worried about LG. Use Android, iOS and Windows. Use Facebook and TikTok! Use WhatApp and get shocked TikTok keeps all data, video, images, text and reads it. Same as WhatsApp. Drive a Tesla. Have that Ring on the door and other devices. Go figure. People are strange. And yes, that ME and PSP are on every cpu since I can't remember, Thinkpad T60 was probably one of the last ones without spy tech.