Looking to upgrade from an old Latitude, curious as to what mobile hardware you folks use for writing your open source projects?

  • Lettuce eat lettuceM
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    8 months ago

    Thinkpad A485. If you’re going used, I would grab a T460, T470, or T480. Really reliable models, all those can be had for $300 or less online, work great with Linux, and last forever. Plus they are decently repairable.

    If new, I would also go with Framework laptops. Super repairable and sustainable. And very high quality laptops. My friend got one and it is super nice. Runs Fedora on it flawlessly.

    • gomp
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      8 months ago

      Thinkpad A485

      I had one of those, but the trackpad occasionally wouldn’t work until I rebooted several times (I was using fedora). Did you run into any similar issue?

      • MadEarl
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        8 months ago

        Had that happen after BIOS updates. Sending it to sleep and waking it up once always fixed it for me.

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      I’ve got a T480 and it gets really good battery life. Having a hot swapable battery is nice too. I would suggest avoiding the ones with a dedicated GPU though. They are power hungry and don’t have enough performance to be worth it.

    • dingdongitsabear
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      8 months ago

      what they said but don’t go below T480; the performance jump is huge (quad vs dual-core) and the price difference is negligible while almost everything is interchangeable (screens, keyboards, cards, plastic parts, dock stations, etc.).

      T480 should be attainable around the $/€ 200 mark nowadays as they’re 5-6 gens behind and upgrading 'em to like 16 or 32 GB and 1TB NVMe or more is stupid cheap.

      • a Kendrick fan
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        8 months ago

        that’s right, the T480 is the best upgradable thinkpad there is, you can even up the ram to 64gb

    • jrgd@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      The A485 is actually such a terrible laptop. I would never reccomend such garbage to anyone considering mine almost never worked properly. I had in three years have six main board replacements for various hardware faults. Not a single of the boards has been free from severe hardware faults.