Comment by jjice
9 hours ago
Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400.
Things I learned to look out for:
- Locked BIOS
- Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it was perfectly fine. It was a pain to get to, but no problems. On a Dell Latitude, it refused to charge my non-OEM battery replacement. My fault - I should've done some research.
In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support. I don't know about other manufacturers, but I hope that that's also the case now too.
Can back this. Many years ago I purchased a Dell Latitude from eBay. After messing around with a 3D printer, there was a short of mains voltage onto the USB line, frying the laptop and tripping the house electrics. I contacted Dell asking for a schematic of the PCBs thinking that I had blown some components, but they informed me that the laptop was still under warranty thanks to the original business purchaser (by just a few weeks).
They shipped a box and allowed me to swap out a hard drive for a spare (I had study data on there), I then used the box to ship the laptop to them. A few weeks later the laptop gets shipped back with a parts replacement list, which was essentially every single PCB in the laptop and I asked them to replace the keyboard too because one key was sticking. Brand new parts in a slightly cracked chassis.
If Dell still has customer service like that, it's double thumbs up from me.
I'm currently using a Lenovo laptop which has been solid so far. I do want my next laptop to be open to repairability (even if I have to create it myself).
Dell customer service is whatever someone wants to pay for.
I bought a new Dell laptop 20-ish years ago along with whatever the super-duper coverage was called at that time (Complete Care, maybe?). IIRC, it only excluded deliberate damage (and "hammer marks" was used as an example).
But they had no trouble sending me parts. Power brick soaked in a flood? No big deal; a new one is on the way. Dropped a screwdriver on the screen at work? They sent a whole person over to replace it.
It was very expensive coverage -- it cost more by itself than the used/refurb laptops we're discussing. It was sold separately. It did not, by my estimation around that time, ultimately pay for itself.
But if you score it for "free" with a used machine, then sure! Bargain!
(A person can check the warranty/service status of an unmolested Dell machine here: https://www.dell.com/support/contractservices/en-us )
It's probably worth it for university though. Back in the day working as a Student Employee for the CSE helpdesk, we ordered overnight replacements for so many laptops and servers an it was super slick and automated, replacement parts showed up and we swapped them in. Very little downtime.
I really don't care for repairability as I average maybe 2 years before getting a new laptop.
In terms of strain on natural resources, that's insane.
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> Things I learned to look out for:
Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.
When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.
They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.
There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.
I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
Maybe what you are noticing is the "laptop on lap" detection? Check the bios, there was a "cool when on lap detected" mode on mine. Turn that off and re-test.
> there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
But such laptops don't work 100% with Asahi. Speakers and mic, external displays, fingerprint reader, suspend are the sore points I've read about, and shorter battery life compared to when they run Apple's SO.
In my experience Intel and AMD Thinkpads of that era are about the same for battery life but Intel always needs some kernel parameters set. Where I notice the biggest difference is Intel's integrated graphics gets you better battery life over anything AMD if your GPU needs are modest enough to be handled by Intel's integrated graphics
ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss.
People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.
That’s horrifying.
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M1 and M2. But those are in an entirely different price bracket. I’d go so far as to say those are not comparable.
You can buy refurb M1s for $379 at Walmart.
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> Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves
Wtf? That sounds crazy, any sources?
This used to be a feature to protect spinning hard drives. Why this would exist today and why it would throttle anything is bizarre.
They don't want you to burn your testicles when keeping it in your lap.
https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/pubs/x1e_p1_gen5/html/htm...
> The Cool and Quiet on lap feature helps cool down your computer when it becomes hot. Any extended contact with your body, even through clothing, could cause discomfort. If you prefer using your computer on the lap, it is recommended that you enable the Cool and Quiet on lap feature in UEFI BIOS:
(it can be disabled on this laptop)
more: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1416567/disable-lap-mode-on-...
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My daily driver for several years now has been an AMD Ryzen 7 powered ThinkPad t495. $120 used. After upgrading the RAM to 64gb it felt very snappy and usable. I run NixOS / Hyprland with rofi/waybar. When an accident happened and the first t495 was damaged, I bought a second for $80, swapped the parts and was back in business. I use it for coding, web research, and a bit of CAD design via FreeCAD. Very happy with the hardware!
I have a MBA M1 and it is everything you would wish in an hardware feature wise (except the keyboard as I like lot of travel). But the OS is abysmal, unless you like to use your device with only apps. Anything else out of the straight path is a pain. And the last years, it seems that the allowed path is closer to mobile OS than a computer to do work.
So, my daily driver is an oldish dell latitude (8th gen intel) running openbsd. Not for the faint of heart, but for a tinkerer, it's a dream.
I keep hearing this thing about apps and I'm confused. I write code on my MBA M1, run orbital simulations, run a media server... All like I would on Linux. What am I missing on userland?
I understand there is low level system stuff I can't control, but I've made my peace with that. When using Linux I hadn't touched its internals for years.
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You can install Linux on an M1/M2. It's not perfect, but it does work pretty well.
Possibly 40gb, but not 64gb. The T495 has 8gb soldered and one DDR4 slot. Concur great hardware, particularly the keyboard.
I swapped the keyboard on my wife's X1 and man, they are so fiddly to get to these days. It used to be a 2 minute job but I think this took me nearly 2 hours! I had to remove practically everything to get to it.
Still happy with the result and I agree that 2nd hand business machines give great bang-for-buck. I adore my beater Dell Latitude for example.
> In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support.
I have tried just one cheap Dell laptop, Vostro 3515, which works mostly fine with Linux (it came with Ubuntu, I have installed Debian), but the touchpad becomes unreponsive sometimes (probably after a sleep), and at some point it refused to charge, which required an UEFI firmware update to fix, which in turn required Windows (I had to use Windows PE) to install, as the direct update (from the UEFI itself) was failing, and there is no Linux option.
Could have been worse, but now considering a Lenovo ThinkPad as a future replacement.
+1
This is my go to way of buying a new laptop. I've gone through 2 machines in the last 8 years (Dell 7270 and 7330). Both bought for <$400. Linux works ootb, though I haven't tried any of the more obscure distros.
Though now manufacturers are doubling down on soldered components, so buying a cheap machine and upgrading the components yourself is not really possible :(
Yep, same experience here, very good results with DELL Latitude E7240, E7260 and similar. Very rugged and Linux works like a breeze - on eBay from $179 (just checked again).
One is well advised to upgrade them to 16 GB RAM and put in a 1 TB SSD, and possibly a new battery. My better half wanted one of those again after I gifted her a brand new MacBook Air, so used she got to the DELL and Ubuntu running on it.
With the recent Intel layoffs many Linux drivers are no longer maintained and as a consequence some older laptops don't boot anymore.
Did upstream disable hardware.. I didnt see the memo for disabling anything boot related.
Can you tell me what you found breaking as I will have to deal with that.
I'm using Linux on some dell precision and camera just don't work. It's possible to install some custom kernel to make it work, but the pain of maintaining it by myself in comparison to IT department supported setup is a no go.