Best means that it's better than everything else which in this case is factually incorrect. I do think that X220 is a great laptop because despite its age, it still runs great. But, tbh, i don't think that it holds up well in terms of performance if we compare it to any modern laptop. What we do want is a modern laptop which is open source friendly, has a great battery life, is repair-friendly, has a good hardware. D…
Look, honestly, for a lot of us this does not matter.
It's a 4-thread 64-bit computer with 16 gigs of RAM and not one but two arbitrarily large SSDs.
Yes, there is modern bloatware -- any desktop app written in Javascript or using Electron, for starters -- that is a bit sluggish, but it's still usable. My X220 runs the latest Ubuntu 25.04 and runs it pretty well. Running Alpine Linux it's extremely snappy, and close to my M1 MacBook Air in performance.
There is still a choice of tools. Choose your tools with some care and this is still a perfectly usable computer.
Rolls Royce does not state performance figures for its cars; it merely says "adequate". The performance of an X220 is adequate.
Computers stopped doubling in performance every 18 months or so nearly 20 years ago now, and since then, they've gained on average about 10% - 15% performance every generation instead.
It's still got adequate horsepower for general use. I can run a VM with a whole modern OS in it and write about that OS in a rich text editor at the same time, while running a browser with a dozen tabs for research and fact-checking.
I don't need cutting-edge performance all the time. It's nice, but then again, the Thinkpad has a much better keyboard than any modern laptop money can buy and it also has 3 physical mouse buttons so I can middle-click. Between its horrible flat keyboard and no right-click or middle-click, I'd rather work all day on my Thinkpad than on the MacBook Air.
Yes, I know how to simulate the missing mouse buttons. I have an app for middle-click. But it's cumbersome and awkward, while the Thinkpad is a joy to work on. I can have 2 screens and a mouse and a keyboard and tether to my phone and have my headphones for a conference call and have it on mains power, all at the same time, without dongles or docks. That's worth a lot too.
It's also much better at virtualisation than the MacBook, and that matters more to me than 8 threads of Arm64 code.