Lenovo ThinkPad X201

Mine still works as well as expected after 17 years, 5-6 of which it spent with heavy daily use, another 2-3 with light use, only occasionally afterwards, and overall a lot of travel and airports. I could disassemble and reassemble it to the last screw easily, no special tools besides a screwdriver, no glue, upgradeable RAM and storage. Actually my one major complaint is Lenovo's use of whitelisting for wireless cards. But I wouldn't pay $1300+ to bring it up to speed. The batteries are done, the screen is small and the backlight is yellowed and dimming. That laptop would need a lot more love to make it fully usable as a daily driver so I'd rather keep it as it is, as a memory.

I have an X201 (15 years old) and X220 (14 years) that I regularly use, running different flavors of linux. they've both been repaired and upgraded a few times. I'm spoiled by having an M2 Macbook as a daily driver - they can't match it for speed - but I love the ruggedness and resilience and I always will.

My personal laptop is a 13-year-old x201. Its "fast enough" for 99% of my uses that aren't gaming.

TLDR: Old Thinkpads are powerful and rugged, but the screens are terrible. A wistful story: I used a Thinkpad X201 (2010 model) as my primary laptop for 6 years. I called it "lappy" (yes, a homestar runner reference). That thing took at serious beating. I worked on solar power system monitoring and control, and this involved a lot of field-work to debug problems. Lappy was exposed to a lot of dirt, dust, moisture, heat, cold, grease, and spilled coffee. Yet, after I upgraded the HD to a SSD it was the fastest build machine on our little software team. It did require repairs, but Thinkpads are designed for repairability. The most fragile part is the power connector, which will break if the laptop falls and lands on the connector while attached to the power cord. This repair requires taking EVERY part out, but I followed the instructions and was able to replace the connector. After taking a break from Lappy for a few years and working on a Macbook with a retina screen, I have to say the biggest deficiency of the Thinkpad was the screen. When I read about using an 11 year old Thinkpad as a primary machine, this is the first thing I think of. After using a modern laptop display I can't go back to that washed out, fuzzy display on the X201. 2 years ago I took it on a "last mission" when I was building an installation at Burning Man, which is probably the most hostile field environment I've worked in. It had started to shut down randomly, but it kept running reliably enough for my

I've been using an x201 for programming and music production (and everything else) since 2014 and don't see myself making a change anytime soon. (Though I recently picked up an IBM server from around the same era for less than the cost of a new cellphone, and now I have what feels like a supercomputer to do offline audio renders and such that are possible on the x201 but take a long time...) I do enjoy the peace of mind that if I drop my laptop in a lake, the cost of replacement is somewhere in the $100 range and dropping every year. But I agree with the author of this article that it's also a nice way to (without really having to think about it) keep the software I write reigned in and usable for people who don't have the latest multi-thousand-dollar hardware.

Agreed. I had an x201 and an x250. The 250 main board eventually stopped working (I think due to flex when the laptop was picked up from one corner repeatedly -- a known issue from what I understand). My x201 still runs great (with occasional refreshes of the thermal paste). A version of the x201-x220 era machines with modern internals would be my dream machine.

> I've install debian onto my fairly ancient Lenovo X201 Tablet and it is exceptionally snappy. I'm running Debian since Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11). My install has always been very lean: a minimal WM I love. Computers have only ever gotten fast and Linux more optimized. It's extremely snappy indeed and feels like it. The problem is what happens inside browsers: are great many websites are just lame. So many pointless connections to so many pointless "telemetry" services, trying to track your every single habit/clicks. Just open the dev tools and look at all the trafic exchanged: that's where the bloat is. The SV JavaScript "punch the monkey" ads bros at work.

I regularly support Windows users and when I do, I cringe at just how awful the experience is! (My daily driver for the last decade have been various flavours of linux) High end Windows 10/11 machines (like my Alienware I9 w/ 64GB mem + RTX4090) seem a bit sluggish. Low end machines with Windows are absolutely painful to use! I've install debian onto my fairly ancient Lenovo X201 Tablet and it is exceptionally snappy.

After my mom's Chromebook died I switched her to Ubuntu + Firefox on a Thinkpad x201 and it's been her daily driver for years. I keep asking to buy her a newer laptop with a bigger screen (800p is pretty painful these days) but she won't let me.

I have an x201 and running arch and bare tty as a distraction free vim + C coding experience. Just for fun. I love it for that.

I think this is because Apple doesn't sell cheap laptops, the cheapest you can buy is the $1000 Macbook Air. If you spend your $1000 on something like a Lenovo Thinkpad or Dell Latitude, it'll also last for over 10 years of active usage. I have a 15 year old Thinkpad X201 that still works fine.

I'll happily agree with that. My X201 was basically the closest thing to walking around with a desktop in your backpack. If I had the money to install a high-res screen, I'd still be using it today.

I still have my Thinkpad X201 from 2011 running, and I use it as my personal machine (have an M1 MacBook from/for work). Of course, had to replace the hard drive once or twice, replaced the whole motherboard once[0], and even though it's 64-bit, the CPU arch (Westmere) lacks some instructions that make some things non-functional (MongoDB, some Steam games don't start), and I had to limit the CPU frequency so it doesn't go into thermal shutdown. Nonetheless it's a joy to use still, and I boot it up with pleasure every time... Thinking when will I pull the trigger on a Framework, though at least I don't feel the pressure too much just yet. :) [0]: https://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2022/07/an-open-heart-motherb...

Of course he does. Because of the robustness but also the keyboard. It's so annoying that they don't make decently build laptops, at all, these days. I'm hanging on to my X201. I bought it after I left my workplace where I had an X230; and I choose an earlier model because I wanted to upgrade rather than downgrade my computer. I am _much_ more satisfied with the X201 - because of the keyboard of course. IIANM, X220 is the best one of the X series. I replaced the HDD with an SSD about 8 years ago and expanded the RAM to 8 GB, and performance is tolerable. At the moment I'm running Lubuntu on it, but I'm thinking of switching to Q4OS. Now, sure, it's old; and yes, it's a bit rickety plastics-wise after having survived a fall from 3m at some point; and yes, the battery life is limited even after replacing it. But - I would take it over a modern piece-of-@#$%-keyboard machine any day of the week.

I have an x220 and an x201 with SATA SSDs and they both run great, although repasting the cpus is on my list of things to do, as the fans do run more than I'd like. I have Debian on both but recently I was testing old SSDs and one had windows 10 and even that was perfectly usable. My main daily driver is a MacBook Pro 64GB M2 Max, so it's not like I live in a world of ancient tech and don't understand the difference.

33 is a bargain. Even with just SATA that's still a pretty impressive machine. I have an x201 and an x220 with SATA SSDs and they're surprisingly fast still

- Do you provide support when they ran into issues? Sure, few of them are from family. They never had issue with OS, mostly it was application related. - Your experience with macOS/Windows will be fairly consistent. I do not agree. Every system update scares me quite a bit. - There are still driver issues with Windows, but they're less common than Linux. On Fedora, I never had to install drivers manually. All drivers was installed together with first upgrade after fresh install. Even on very old ThinkPad x201 from 2011. On Windows it's mix of searching on multiple HW manufacturer sites, manually installing them and trying if they are compatible.

X201 i5? I installed OpenBSD latest on mine and was impressed by the battery life contre toute attente. Fvwm with some essential tray apps and we're good! If Jupyter Lab ran on this setup, I'd be a total convert. In terms of hardware, I installed coreboot and replaced the wlan with something modern from China. I plan to upgrade from 2 GB to 8 GB but hard to find compatible SO-DIMM these days. It would be bloody awesome to upgrade the display to FHD but that looks... complicated, we'll see. But I love working with an OS where I understand everything.

It’s an extremely comfy laptop. Still handles the modern web OK, especially if you use uMatrix to block third party garbage.

I wish they deliver good keyboard as well, like Thinkpads X201 or similar have. I am happy owner of modded X201 with updated screen, motherboard, and so on. It's not on a cheap side, but I'm happy to pay that price _only_ for the keyboard option. It's so cool. Folks back then knew what was important.

Does a current-gen laptop featuring an X201-like keyboard exist? Has such a thing even existed in the last five years?

I used to have an x201 which I loved to death. I upgraded to an x240 a couple years ago and I honestly find it mediocre; it has an awful trackpad, and it gets hot way too easily. I bought my dad an x220 for his birthday a couple years ago and I love that thing to death -- such a great laptop in look and feel (if you dig the retro aesthetic). I'm hoping to pick up an X1 Carbon or a Framework laptop one day, but I frankly have minimal use for laptops in general at the moment.

It's weird. I own two Thinkpads, a "golden era" model with the 7-row keyboard (x201) as well as a newer Skylake model (T460s). The difference between the two is noticeable, but not as much as people make it out to be. The older model feels like a really solidly built device, and the performance is surprisingly good while running Linux. It idles on the hot side (little less than 40c no matter what you're running), but CPU usage is low even on high-bloat desktop environments like KDE. Without anything running in the background, CPU usage stays below 2%, which kinda blows my mind for a machine pushing a decade old. The newer model I have is much the same way, but it's thinner and idles at a much more reasonable temp (28-30c). Frankly, I think they're both fine. The new keyboards aren't mind-blowing, but I'd still put them leagues beyond Dell and Apple's offerings these days. I'd frankly recommend either of them, as long as you can find one without a TN panel. The other advice I'd give is to not buy directly from Lenovo, since their prices are all over the place and tend to screw you over if you don't do your due diligence.

If you don't need the newest and fastest, I recommend a ThinkPad X201 (upgrade the LCD to an AFFS one if you like a little DIY), or you can go really hard and get an X61. Debian has worked great on both.

I tried to sync for several years and it never worked. I tried everything. Eventually we just moved to using one computer and sharing it. Its not healthy to spend all the time on it anyway. Having a pooled machine has a number of social benefits as well. So we have a single laptop, three smartphones (my oldest daughter has one as well) and they're all handed in weekly to me for data extraction and archival. The laptop is a Lenovo X201 so it can go anywhere and we have a docking station and full desktop setup if you need anything a little more healthy to use.