my brother runs a thinkpad T380. best thing about it is that there is a swappable and a built-in battery. he bought it “refurbished” so his didn’t include the internal one for some reason. but you can open and even upgrade some components.
all for around 300€.
we think these have benn bought by companies for full price (1000+€) and are now being replaced, so the market for used thinkpads is very saturated at the moment.
currently runs windows, but i see no problems with running linux on a laptop, you aren’t gonna game on integrated graphics anyway.
i’ve used Linux Mint Cinnamon a fair bit, i really like it. i’ve heard KDE offers more desktop customization, but i have no idea what that would actually look like. Kubuntu apparently has it.
Can’t tell you what laptop to buy, but distro wise I’d recommend either Pop OS, Zorin or Linux Mint. Zorin is most windows-like, with Mint coming in second. Pop OS is very different but incredibly user friendly.
Choose whatever laptop you like, and do a quick search on the model for incompatibilities. If there’s something critical or long-term, like a very specific hardware module not working well without its proprietary driver, consider changing, but most of the time, Linux will just work.
For distro, PopOS is good. It doesn’t come with a bunch of bloatware, but it is also not barebones. Mint is also a great choice.
If you just want stuff to work with minimal hassle, Linux Mint is an excellent choice. PopOS is also often recommended, especially for laptops. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty, something Arch based might fit the bill.
For the software side I would recommend Linux Mint as a great simple starter distro with good support and a nice community. The overall design paradigm is about maintaining familiarity while also making sane defaults and simplifying processes. Because it is Ubuntu based it is also easy to get documentation and support because what works for Ubuntu also works for Mint.
For hardware it really depends on your budget and locality as well as use case. Laptops vary much more country to country than you may think, so it may be worth thinking about what is local to you. For example, I live in Australia so System76 is a bad choice here, same with SlimBook (I think that is the name, European KDE laptop that advertises with that French(?) YouTuber, they don’t ship here.
Also, when looking at laptops the RAM configuration is important. If you have two RAM slots but only one RAM stick you will have really slow memory access. This will bottleneck for both the CPU and GPU if you are using both at the same time, say during gaming or doing AI work. Swapping out the single stick for a matching pair or just adding one more stick that matches what it already has will let both ports work together, making everything faster. Also when I say matching I mean in terms of size and speed. If you put 3200MHz and 2400MHz in the system at the same time the 3200MHz won’t just down tune to match, they will both go slower as far as I am aware. Best to match not only the speed but if possible the brand and ideally model, there are lots of little differences between RAM sticks and honestly it has never been worth the trouble in my experience to have mismatched sticks, I just replace with a matching pair.
Any modern Thinkpad will run any Linux distro easy, from bios updates up to gaming with Proton. Dell laptops also have a good linux support. Try to avoid laptops with Nvidia cards though, AMD driver installation is way easier if not completely invisible/painless.
The XDG Base Directory Specification is a set of guidelines to tell application developers where they should store their application’s config files, cache, etc.
There are many applications that don’t follow the guidelines and put their files in a hidden folder directly in your home directory, which is what the guidelines are trying to combat.
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