Legit, it’s the way to go. Even with the memory fuckery ongoing, you can pick up decent used ThinkPads all day long for way less than anything else. They won’t be great gaming platforms, but you can do some gaming on them.
Pick any of the most recommended “distros” you want to try, make thumb drives that can boot them, and you don’t even have to install any until after you’ve seen that they can handle your needs.
Me? I’m a mint guy. Next to zero chance of it not working on anything I want it to, easy to use and a good package repository. PopOs is good, Ubuntu is okay. And there’s a good handful of other solid, noob friendly ones out there.
They’re business gear. Nothing flashy, nothing really well marketed as a personal computer. A lot of people don’t even know they exist.
Some folks? They see that they aren’t super expensive and assume that means they suck. But because they’re designed for business use, they tend the be built really well. Durable; light enough to be portable, but not flimsy.
They seem pretty iconic albeit in a niche kind of way, like its arguably the first thing that comes to find from someone whos never really substantially known or been involved with Linux despite the occasional passing fancy
Id love to experiment with Linux. Wonder if i could just get a ThinkPad.
You can (probably) use Linux on your Mac! If it’s an M chip then you can run Asahi on it.
I’m not saying you should because some things may not work, eg the fingerprint reader. Just throwing it out in case it’s interesting to you :)
Legit, it’s the way to go. Even with the memory fuckery ongoing, you can pick up decent used ThinkPads all day long for way less than anything else. They won’t be great gaming platforms, but you can do some gaming on them.
Pick any of the most recommended “distros” you want to try, make thumb drives that can boot them, and you don’t even have to install any until after you’ve seen that they can handle your needs.
Me? I’m a mint guy. Next to zero chance of it not working on anything I want it to, easy to use and a good package repository. PopOs is good, Ubuntu is okay. And there’s a good handful of other solid, noob friendly ones out there.
Why are they so under/devalued in your opinion?
They’re business gear. Nothing flashy, nothing really well marketed as a personal computer. A lot of people don’t even know they exist.
Some folks? They see that they aren’t super expensive and assume that means they suck. But because they’re designed for business use, they tend the be built really well. Durable; light enough to be portable, but not flimsy.
They seem pretty iconic albeit in a niche kind of way, like its arguably the first thing that comes to find from someone whos never really substantially known or been involved with Linux despite the occasional passing fancy