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Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

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Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#22
post #13

despite so many problems that OP stated, he's still recommending it!

Different people have different needs. This laptop despite its minor flaws was in the end the best option for his particular needs

...or as a HN user said a while back:

    tuananh 42 days ago | parent [-] | on: Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM
    
    all of this largely depends on personal preference.
    
    to me, i value battery so much more.
:)

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#23
post #3

Ive went with a T420 recently, mostly because of the keyboard. But also because $400 for laptop + battery + Samsung SSD + 16GB hyperX Ram sounded so cheap i could not resist. And honestly even after a 2015 MBP it feels perfect for all my needs. In fact due to the superior RAM and SSD it feels often way faster than the MBP for 5 times that price felt. Plus it has way better battery life. Seriously Thinkpads are the be…

Have their trackpads improved at all during the last five years?

I dont know. But the keyboard got slightly worse.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#24
post #14

I could buy 3 equivalent laptops (finding IPS might be a problem) for the price. Is the Thinkpad brand really worth that much?

It depends on what you want.

You can buy reasonably cheap laptops with similar specs, either by buying >2 generations back (this T430 was $300), or by buying new models that are made of cheap plastic.

In my experience, all laptops eventually suffer damage, the more durable ones just take longer and tend to be more minor faults each time.

So if you can afford your laptop suddenly failing and switching to another machine (possibly by swapping the drive out, presuming that didn't fail, or restoring from backups/cloud storage), great, you have a robust setup. But many people don't have such a robust configuration, nor do they bring a backup laptop when e.g. traveling.

So for individuals and businesses that have configurations of Highly Replicated Data (where it doesn't matter if you lose an individual laptop), it might be worth it to buy lots of cheap laptops.

For cases where the amount of time/value of data lost to failed laptops is worth far more than the cost difference of the more durable laptops, it's probably worth it to get the ones with the rollcages and carbon fiber-infused chassis and [...].

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#25
post #3

Ive went with a T420 recently, mostly because of the keyboard. But also because $400 for laptop + battery + Samsung SSD + 16GB hyperX Ram sounded so cheap i could not resist. And honestly even after a 2015 MBP it feels perfect for all my needs. In fact due to the superior RAM and SSD it feels often way faster than the MBP for 5 times that price felt. Plus it has way better battery life. Seriously Thinkpads are the be…

Huh, didn't know that t420 supported 16gb of ram - time to upgrade my trusty & dusty workhorse!

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#26
post #7

This week at CES the T470 will be announced. So if you're thinking about buying one you might want to wait for that

For Linux I highly recommend a further waiting of 6-9 months (e.g. (x)ubuntu 17.04.1)

But it's not LTS. All the major software stuff will be well supported for 16.04 till 18.04.

If you look around, you'll mostly find 14.04/16.04 in supported OSes. Even for OSS software, not just commercial stuff.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#27
post #8

And one of the most awesome things about Thinkpads not mentioned; you can get every (most?) replacement part directly from Lenovo. You can actually look up the part number in the service manual, order it, and replace it yourself. For nerds like us, this is sooo nice sometimes, when you just wanna get it fixed quickly, from the comfort of your own home.

How much do parts cost though? Are they reasonably priced?

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#28
I have the T450s, and it's a great laptop for sure. But as someone who has owned laptops from the previous IBM ThinkPad series, there is a noticeably deterioration in quality ever since Lenovo took over. Is it only my laptop or have others noticed this as well?

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#29
post #12

I've owned Thinkpads in the past and almost bought the T460 last month, then I discovered the Dell XPS / Precision line and fell in love. I picked up a manufacturer refurbished XPS 15 on eBay and wound up swapping in a Dell Precision E3-1505M motherboard I stumbled across. The line has Intel quad core CPUs, minimal bezel (my 15" is almost the same size as the 14" System 76 Galago Ultra Pro it's replacing), reasonably…

With discovered you mean you bought one? What about the noise and battery time under normal and high work load?

I used to have a Dell Precision M4800 and honestly you don't buy them for battery life. They're desktop workstation replacements that you haul off to meetings occasionally. I got about 2-3 hours of battery time on that thing when running usual work-related workloads on it... (IDE, VM's etc.). I don't remember the noise, but I'm not very sensitive to noisy laptops so I may have never noticed.

I miss that laptop. The build quality was through the roof and it was solid as a brick.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#30
My experience with Lenovo:

Personal Machine: (Ubuntu/CentOS with 1 or 2 VM running sometimes) For me: AMD Quad Core - A10 7300 , with 8GB DDR3 RAM and 1TB HDD (acer aspire e15) is perfect Linux development machine, it costs less than $500 . Unless you are running 3 or more VM or stuffs like high-end data processing using 16GB RAM for development is worthless.

Work machine: (Windows / Fedora-19 with 3VBox vm running most of the time) We (team of 7 members) received new Lenovo thinkpad in 2012, with 256SSD, 16GB ram, and i7 processor. Within 18months 3 or 4 of my friends faced hardware related-issues (suddenly stopped booting etc). Luckily mine survived until I left the company in 2015.

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