LinuxBBQ

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how about the T420? Are the lenovo ones significantly worse?

I haven't bought a new computer in five years,

^ I haven't bought a computer in 16 years :p

I have always wanted an IBM Thinkpad but I have never bought one because I cannot deal with the emotional pain of the "fn" and "ctrl" keys being switched D:

^ Yep, xev shows the keycode 151 for the WakeUpEvent (fn key) but remapping with xmodmap doesn't do anything. OTOH Ctrl is a tad bigger than Fn, so it just takes a few minutes to get used to it. Apparently on some models you can change Fn and Ctrl in the BIOS. Not on this T43 however.

liknites wrote:^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
how about the T420? Are the lenovo ones significantly worse?

I haven't bought a new computer in five years,

I only had the painful experience to use a Lenovo D5xx and it was overheating, had a shitty display, and it was crafted really shitty. I guess you better go to a store and just try a few of them, then later check if you can find a second hand Lenovo, in this case. I definitely recommend IBM but I am hesitant to recommend Lenovo. Or better say it like this: if you can get it for a fair price, it won't hurt you. Of course, if your aim is to browse the internet 90% of the time and occasionally play around in the console, a Lenovo is fine, too. But Lenovo does not have the feel of a real IBM. My T43 is from 2005, and shows no signs of age :) Not sure if a Lenovo would even survive 10 years without breaking something. Quality issues, I can tell - have been living in China for 10 years, and I know from personal experience (been there, seen that) how they manufacture stuff.

Yeah the IBM Thinkpads are amazing compared the Laveno ones will use mine till I wear it out.:)

my GF bought a Lenovo, and while it looks slick and nothing immediately seems to be wrong, i find that after only four months of use the mousepad buttons are already getting loose. so i guess that goes with what Bacon said.
fwiw, i've had a Packard Bell laptop for the past six years now, and it is still working well. haven't had any real hardware failures except for the battery no longer working, but that is probably because i always use it plugged in, so it decided "if youre not gonna use me, im not gonna work anymore" and sat in a corner crying.

Although the T61 is a Lenovo model, in my experience it's still a good one. I've heard it said by others that this was the last good model before the ThinkPads went "full Lenovo," so to speak. Prior to that, I had a T43, and it was definitely rock solid.

What Bacon said and ^ this Bones. The T61 is miles better than all the newer Lenovo models. I think the T60s series has even the three letters on it.

As a side note, I would also recommend some older Dell business notebooks, they are rock solid, too, at least in my experience.

Go shop on Ebay or ask Pidsley, he was buying a ton of used computers on Ebay with good experience.
I really do not care for shiny new stuff they offer right now in the consumer market.

/insert Nokia meme here

The main desktop now runs bork with nix package manager, and nixos on another partition. I have several machines at my disposal, the mac mini runs arch, the amd work desktop runs wheezy with extra bloats, the ideapad runs szalonna and crux, the old compaq runs funtoo, tje 2nd primary machine runs netbsd.. Some old netbooks (axioo, asus, hp mini) on antix 14/15, and several others on proprietary os.

^ Ahh, a Nix user. I still haven't tried it. Is the package manager as good as they say?

Btw, you have so many machines, I'm a bit jealous :D

cheers
simon

^ sometimes it brings shitload of packages that'll make you go nuts, and some packages size are absolutely huge. Good thing is you can always modify the packages (even debugging your own packages are somewhat easy via the repl).

Daily OS is BBQ/Hipster/wmutils on my Thinkpad X201

Thanks for the responce Franc, is it worth running/trying or?

For work development I run the latest Ubuntu I think its 14.04 lts. That runs several VM's but for hardware design using AutoCad and software using Siemens S7 I am in Win7 VM, I have a matching setup at the home office. That machine has a mutli boot and has a failing 1TB drive with my other linux partitions (BBQ, Sabotage, etc) and it also dual boots with FreeBSD, NetBSD current (seperate drive). My second home desktop machine uses NetBSD 7/64 and dual boots to NetBSD 7/32. My laptop dual boots NetBSD 7/64 and OpenBSD 5.8. I also have a pogoplug that I use as a AP and it runs Debian (may switch to arch arm 6) and a pi with openelec running Debian. And there is a chromebook that dual boots into arch arm 7 and a original amazon fire running cyanogen CM10?

I think that is it in a nutshell ;)

Same old, same old for me:

Daily usage
Dell Inspiron 1525, with a heavily bloated LinuxBBQ Lacipecsenye (XFCE, Emacs, LaTeX, tons of fonts, Inkscape and Gimp because yes, LibreOffice because sometimes I have to). In the office I plug it to an external HP Pavilion 22cw and my trusty Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate.

Hobby
- Fedora 22 + MATE / LinuxBBQ Szalonna on my HP Pavilion at home (this is the media server)
- Arch Linux + evilwm on my Acer Aspire 1304

Experiments
- Pentium 4 with Ubuntu netinstall + busybox + evilwm
- Pentium 4 with Debian sid + busybox + jwm
- Pentium 4 with Debian Jessie

^^^ i would only recommend it only if:

1. You happened to use something like ansible / puppet and wanted to try something new
2. You like functional programming language, and wanted to try something not quite lispy/haskell-ish (p.s i like your doctor racket signature)
3. You don't mind getting your system a bit fat.

There's a ton of things i learned by installing nix alongside debian, so personally it's been a worthy endeavor

Wow, good response Frank, I will give it a whirl.

Cheers buddy

simon

My office computer: A bad little Dell box that I suspect is specially refurbished in bulk for businesses (an "Octiplex 980").

Popcorn Lite is the main system on it, all bloated out with LaTeX and Libreoffice (yeah, sometimes it's necessary) and GIMP and Inkscape, all useful for work. (Bork is on another partition for playing around with.) Openbox for light work; dwm for when things get serious.

Classroom computer: Usually the same sort of refurb'd Dell. Run Semplice live system from usb for teaching, loading dwm for easy switching between map image, slide presentation / notes, and web browser. I gather that I should be able to make a snapshot of a bbq system customized to my liking, but I haven't gotten that to work successfully yet.

Win7 is what my college expects me to be running. On rare occasions, I'm forced to boot it up (Then wait 10 minutes while it installs a hundred patches and updates), since certain licensed institutional systems, all of them terrible, will only work properly with it.

Home office has a fit-pc2 running Semplice because I can't get ceni to talk to the wifi device. Likewise bloated with office and graphics software for academic work.

My play/travel device is an HP Chromebook I bought mostly with gift cards. Via crouton it runs what appears to be vanilla Debian Sid -- which crouton is nice enough to include among its "targets" -- but one that came with i3 already installed. It breaks all the time with crouton updates and my attempts at installing stuff not in repos, but that's okay.