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@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

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

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

Not with the trackpad, but other issues yeah. For some reason, this model seems to be really finicky depending on the distro you use.

I had weird random issues with most distros I've tried on it over the years.

The two distros that have worked with almost no issues are Manjaro, and Mint Debian Edition, which is what I currently run on it.

The most frequent I had with it were random lockups when bringing it out of sleep mode.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 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.

[–] jrgd@lemm.ee 2 points 11 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.