Linux

Yes

He doesn't know, that's how fucked up he is.

Yeah back when it was IBM before they sold off to Lenovo. Back when their biggest selling point was their priority was keeping you up & running and getting work done. Nowadays nearly all the products are made with the priority “So, how do we design this so the user will have to pay for it multiple times?”

you can't get a framework for 20€ on ebay tho + old thinkpads (older laptops in general) are just way robuster and have better build quality in general

ThinkPads are business machines and those are extremely repairable compared to consumer machines. Even my shitty Dell precision has instructions on how to disassemble it etched onto the mainboard. And since business laptops get dumped after a few years of relatively light use (many are de facto stationary), you can get pretty good machines for very cheap.

ThinkPads are just very popular, because they are consistently pretty good and don't stand in your way softwarewise, which isn't always true for Dell or HP machines.

I don't have over 1k to drop on a laptop, I spent $150 on a T440p, it does web browsing and other basic tasks very well.

They had a Chinese back door in the firmware. Don’t know if that’s still the case. https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem-to-have-a-bios-level-backdoor.html They’ve had several major (intentional) security flaws over the years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo They had a modified UEFI that allows insecure execution of EXEs. The Lenovo laptops given to US military in Iraq had keyloggers that sent all inputs back to China.