My Latest ThinkPad Setup: New Laptop and Distro

It’s official. I’ve now become a new, fully-fledged member of the ThinkPad cult community. What have I done? I’ve only gone at bought yet another ThinkPad - this time a ThinkPad T470, which I got for £91 on eBay! Just to be clear, this isn’t my daily driver. This is a play laptop.

I was hoping to get a T480, but it was a little out of my price range for what I would consider a “budget laptop” (under £100). Anyway, my ThinkPad family has doubled from 1 to 2, and I’m sure the folks over on Reddit at r/thinkpad could only be too thrilled by the news. What can I say? I love ThinkPads.

I thought I would put together a short follow-up post from my last blog post regarding my honest review of the X240. As great as it was (form factor-wise) I just really didn’t like the trackpad. I just didn’t feel quite right. Now that I’ve got my T470, this isn’t an issue. So what have I done differently? Apart from changing the distro, not much really. As much as I love Arch Linux for being super lightweight and efficient, it’s not perfect. I just wanted everything to be complete, which, I know, goes against the Arch philosophy of installing the bare minimum. I think what really I wanted was a fully-featured distro.

In the end, after playing with Debian and Fedora, I settled on Fedora. With the benefits of six-month update cycle, Fedora strikes a nice balance between the robustness of Debian and the freshness of Arch.

Overall, I really like working with the distro. Everything works out of the box and is ready to go. I don’t understand why I didn’t try Fedora sooner. Even Linus Torvalds himself (the creator of the Linux kernel) uses Fedora, including his family. That is a resounding endorsement.

I stuck with the default GNOME desktop environment as it look and behaviours much in a way that closely resembles my work MacBook Pro. I wasn’t so keen on using KDE, as I just don’t like the look and feel of it. It reminds me way too much of Windows.

So what about the old X240?

I was planning to put it on eBay, but I just couldn’t part with it. Despite the incredibly annoying trackpad, I just didn’t want to let it go. It will forever be a part of my ThinkPad collection.

In the end, I just installed headless Debian (Debian without a desktop environment) which I can use to mess around with or maybe use as a server. Either way, not having a desktop environment installed means I use nothing but a terminal UI, which means I don’t have to use the ghastly trackpad.

This marks just the start of my ThinkPad journey. I’m sure, I will buy many more to come. I’m currently looking at T480s then I may progress to an X1 Carbon.