Thinkpad X210 • Hacker News Board

Re: Thinkpad X210

#71

Post by pixelmonkey » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

If you can still find one on then used market, I'll put in a plug for the Lenovo X1C 4th Gen (2016 model) as an ideal Linux laptop. It's what I switched to after the x220, and I describe it here:

https://amontalenti.com/2017/09/01/lenovo-linux

Fan never turns on, matte display, awesome connectivity, great battery life, and everything on Linux just works.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#72

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #23

tartuffe78 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use SMC fan control on my older MacBook Pro to just run the fan at medium at all times. Definitely miss that you can't use it on the new touchbar MacBook pros.

Interestingly, macOS has been the only OS where I have not had this be an issue. 95+% of the time the fans are off, and rouge runaway processes are quite rare (which is not true of say Linux or Windows, in my experience).

Yes, the only time I hear the fans on my MacBook is when I boot into Windows.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#73

Post by random878 » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

0w4u2a wrote: post #25

Please, allow me to hijack this thread. What's the best Thinkpad I could get in Europe for ~200€ right now? (Off eBay of course). I don't care whether it's 13" or 15". Edit: thanks for all the replies.

Best is different to everyone.

My top choice = best for Freedom; X200 or T400 for about £50 to 70. Debian or Trisquel. £3 or so for a cheap SOIC clip, beg/borrow a Raspberry Pi, and libreboot it.

If you want something more modern (but not as Free); X250, T450, T550. (13/14/15") Lots on eBay due to high turnover from business. I have an X250 running Debian (one blob for the WiFi). Perfect robust student laptop.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#74

Post by 0815test » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #2

>Linux worked out of the box. I had to install non-free drivers for the Broadcom wireless card, then tweak a few module options to get better power saving. This is not, for the record, "working out of the box".

Meh, if the non-free blobs are included as part of the distro (as they are with the Debian 'non-free' channel, similar to Ubuntu) it's as good as we've ever going to get. Even Intel wifi cards rely on a non-free firmware blob, and will only work with "non-free" Debian.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#75

Post by scooble » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #62

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've genuinely never had to install any drivers or change any settings after installing Windows? I find this very hard to believe.

For printers and external accessories, maybe? My experience with laptops has always been that every built-in component works with no configuration, which isn’t true for Linux. However, I haven’t bought a Windows laptop for quite a while, so maybe this situation is no longer true?

> However, I haven’t bought a Windows laptop for quite a while

Are you talking about buying a laptop with windows pre-installed, or installing windows on a barebones laptop?

I doubt that a laptop with linux preinstalled from e.g. dell requires you to install drivers. It's been a while since I did a barebones windows install, but I would be surprised if no drivers were required.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#76

Post by veryworried » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #17

I have a Lenovo T430u running Kali, and it is rock solid. I love the keyboard, and I use the TrackPoint for CAD work in FreeCAD. I never feel like it is going to slip from my hands when I pull it from my backpack. It is so easy to open up, that I open it twice or more a year to clean out the fans, which are usually clean anyway; I like seeing the internals like a car mechanic who likes to check under the hood ;) I co…

Why in God’s name are you using Kali as a daily driver? Anyone who does this has no idea what they’re doing. Kali is made exclusively for pentesting, with a modified and insecure kernel specifically for running certain pentesting apps better.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#77

Post by badsectoracula » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

Causality1 wrote: post #12

This reminds me of just how much I hate whoever came up with chiclet keyboards and ruined laptops forever.

Probably the same person who came up with the idea of using widescreens on laptops. At least with keyboards, if you have enough money, you can buy a brand new laptop with mechanical keyboard.

Nobody is even making 4:3 monitors anymore, laptops or not.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#78

Post by lapinot » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

shasheene wrote: post #48

This is a good time to bring up the fact there was never an industry-wide standardization effort for laptops. A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades: the laptop case, power supply, monitor, keyboard, touchpad could all be re-used without any additional effort. This improves repairability, is much better for the environment, and means higher-end components can be selected with the…

This would allow smaller players to step in and to start grinding some market shares of the big players. It would also turn the laptop market from a high margin market to a low margin one. Standardization is just not in the interest of any big player so it's probably never gonna happen. If you are a small player and want to go that direction you're probably gonna be bought out. The only way i see would be to somehow get pervasive open standards and libre schematics implementing them, and then cut out the big players and get several manufacturers to produce them. But that too is hardly gonna happen because of geopolitical problems: most of these manufacturers are domiciled in china and thus this move would cut to much income from western (and korean, japanese) countries. So for that to happen we would have to relocate some manufacturing industry and somehow not put them in the hands of any of our local big players. The problem here is not some problematic business decisions by companies, it's how we organized our economy. It would take radical changes in the economic/industrial policy to make that happen: much stronger anti-trust laws, which would keep companies smaller and force cooperation; public- instead of private-regulated prices so that you don't die to foreign companies' exportation when you start doing that; etc. This would drive cooperation up in all of the economy, take power away from multinationals, reduce waste, hinder "useless innovation". Long road ahead but i think that's what we need and that's what gonna happen at some point anyway: the capitalistic class may still be floating currently, but at some point the systemic crisis (financial instability, natural disasters, political instability, scarcity of energy and other basic resources) is gonna hit them too. What we have to make sure is that they don't get more out-of-sync with that than they currently are.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#79

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

[deleted]

Re: Thinkpad X210

#80

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

zhte415 wrote: post #58

0w4u2a wrote: post #25

Please, allow me to hijack this thread. What's the best Thinkpad I could get in Europe for ~200€ right now? (Off eBay of course). I don't care whether it's 13" or 15". Edit: thanks for all the replies.

For what it's worth, I still use a circa 2011 T420 for my work PC (decent spec for the time with i7 and 8GB RAM) which will probably be around or under your price. Great ThinkPad keyboard (non-chiclet), and instead of following the company upgrade cycle I opted for an SSD and new battery. A lot of corporates off-load perfectly good laptops (as 'company property' they've often been taken care of reasonably well, or ju…

We had a T420 for a while, they are nice machines and I think the last of that series where you can wipe the BIOS password without replacing the motherboard.