Check out Minifree Ltd. They refurbish old Thinkpads, replace the bootloader with libreboot, and come with encrypted Debian KDE. They offer either the T440p or the X230, and you can choose different SSD and RAM configurations. Prices are as low as £258.00 for the X230 with 16GB of RAM and a 480 GB SSD.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Cool! Thanks for sharing
Minifree is between double to triple the price of the same laptop on eBay. Libreboot is strictly an ideological matter, it doesn't help with privacy if software installed isn't configured a certain way and also what software is installed.
BIOS is not the bacldoor is. Also, if you don't build your on router, you can't garauntee who your router is sending packets to. Also DNS makes a different. Libreboot does not provide the protection think it does.
It doesn't help that Libreboot laptops are at least 10 years old. Those are some low resolution LCD screens compared the LED and full hi-def.
How cheap is cheap? Imo the sweetspot is the T480
I just picked up a used Thinkpad t480 with 8th gen i5 / 16gb ram / ssd for about $120 on ebay. I believe 8th gen the first i5 quad core for laptops. And T480 is the last Thinkpad with removable battery and two dimm slots. Kindof the sweet spot between the old upgradability and modernish hardware imo
Aren't ThinkPads dual channel ram anymore?
They are dual channel. On the newer ThinkPads, one or both channels of ram are soldered to the motherboard so you can't upgrade them.
Same here .... also had the removable cd drive that you can swap for a CD drive HDD adapter slot (which I did and added a traditional 2GB HDD) to go along with my 250GB SSD
$120? Dang, can confirm those are very usable, got mine when it was new. L480 is good too, lighter but no external battery.
I think almost anything with 8+ GB Ram will do. And it should have some kind of SSD of course because that makes the biggest noticable speed difference when booting, launching apps, opening files. Also, if its too old, the battery will last only minutes, so that's something to keep in mind.
I'm currently using a T580 (i5-8350U). The refurb model cost me $440CAD. It has a 15.6" screen, backlit keyboard, came with a 512GB NVMe drive and 16GB of RAM. It charges with a 65 watt USB-C cable. It also has dual batteries (one is internal, the other is hot-swappable) and together give me 10-14 hours.
I've been using it for 8 months now and its been absolutely fantastic and no laggy performance or thermal issues. Zero driver issues on install. I run Debian/XFCE.
You should probably specify your budget and preferred screen size, as it would help with recommendations.
I’m using a Thinkpad X220 with upgraded RAM and SSD and USB 3 ExpressCard as a secondary laptop and it’s still useable for daily tasks, with the odd little slowdown. It’s also got the classic Thinkpad keyboard.
Define cheap. The least expensive laptop on Dell Refurbished currently is $180 and would easily run any desktop environment, including the heavyweights. Specs are here:
CPU
1x Intel Core i5-6300U (2-Core, 2.40 GHz)
Memory
8 GB (1x 8GB)
HDD
256 GB (1x 256 GB SSD)
Display
14" HD (1366 x 768)
If you're thinking cheaper yet, you'll want at least a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM. Just about any business laptop from the last 10 years or so would work, as long as you stay away from bottom of the barrel Celerons or AMD processors and <4GB of RAM. You can run Linux on a very low spec machine, but you'd want to use a lightweight DE and web browsing wouldn't be a fun experience.
A T570 on eBay or where you can find it.
IDK if this fits for you, but my favorite Linux laptop for many years now has been Chromebook + crostini. Excellent hardware support and generally very stable platform, excellent Linux installation and fully-featured as long as you're not doing games or driver development or something similar. Research to get a good-hardware model (i.e. not the Pixelbook) and if it fits for what you need, it's excellent.
One downside though is Crostini takes a pretty big performance hit. I remember comparing Crostini (Linux in a VM) to Crouton (native) and it was night and day. I agree it's workable though it probably means you may need to pick out a Chromebook with sufficient specs.
Hm, that's a good point. I think it depends on what you're doing too though - running Chromium is very clearly slower than the native Chrome because of windowing interactions, running gimp in crostini seems fast but has window-handling glitches sometimes, running command-line or server tasks seems to run at 100% full speed (as it's just running normally on the native kernel).
You definitely do have to research and get one with good specs, not just one of the $150-for-a-Celeron ones. My whole history with Chromebooks was gradually spending more and more on progressively more powerful ones, and being progressively more happy with the result each time, up until I got a Pixelbook and it was kind of crap. 🥲
I run gnome/Firefox on a Dell 7290 with a 4k monitor on a doc and I don't have any trouble with it. If you get the 16 gb ram and i7 8th gen you'll be fine for a while.
They can be great. I would look for a 4 core CPU, 16 GB of RAM and a good 1080p screen. The SSD can be upgraded for cheap right now. The RAM upgrade depends on the generation, many newer slim laptops hava soldered dimms.
T480 is pretty cheap now. The i5-8350u it has is still plenty capable.
You can get some pretty decent refurbished laptops on Amazon:
...you can even return them if you don't like it.
I have like 10 old laptops that I mess around with. Got various Linux distros on them.
I have patience as I know some of these machines are older.
I’m basically going to say for me. Specs doesn’t matter. What matter is a good quality display. I value that highly for web browsing. Yes, all the laptops I have here have shitty displays 😞
I have a couple of old tablet/convertable netbooks. They have quite nice displays, just small. 2GB RAM and Intel Atom CPUs. They are quite slow but the display more than makes up for it heh. (HP and an old MS Surface)
x280
I got a refurbished HP Elitebook for under $500 that had 500 gb nvme and 16 gb ram, core i5 gen 8 processor from Woot. Still had part of the original warranty as well as a one year one from the refurb company. Runs great, no dents or wear. Can do Windows 11 if you ever had to. I personally have had good success with HP Pro/Elite/Z lines vs Lenovo in just not having random problems. Main problem is if you let them get too dead battery wise but it could be replaced since it’s easy to open usually. We have hundreds of them in use for years and not much issues. Seen more problems on Lenovos in a business setting even brand new expensive ones.
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