I bought a Thinkpad

My laptop was a Surface Pro 4, and I find the performance was sufficient for my needs. I wanted a Linux laptop, and I tried by installing Linux on my Surface. With the stock kernel, everything except touch worked and with the custom kernel even touch. I ran into one small issue that I wasn’t able to resolve, and that was with the wifi. Unpredictably the wifi would just cut-out, and I couldn’t recover it without rebooting. After struggling with that for a few weeks, I finally decided that I needed to purchase a laptop that I could run Linux and would be fully functional. There are plenty of excellent machines on the market that can run Linux, but I didn’t want to spend over a thousand dollars to make that happen. After listening to the Alan Pope episode on Jupiter Extras about Thinkpads, I decided to do a little research. My Surface Pro 4 has a 6th gen Core i5 which I knew had plenty of horsepower for how I use it, so I decided that I would start looking at Thinkpads with at least the 6th gen processors. A nice feature of the Surface Pro 4 is portability, so I prioritized finding a Thinkpad X series instead of opting for the T series. I finally settled on finding a Thinkpad X260. It took a little searching, but I finally found one that I wanted to purchase, which was well under $200 US. I bought a 256GB SSD and a single 16GB stick DDR 2133MHz RAM. Upgrading was easy to perform and only took a few minutes to complete. One thing that may or may not be an issue is that the model I purchased came with a 720p TN screen. Thinkpads are extremely easy to work on, and parts are readily available. I used my model number to determine which screen I needed and ordered me a 720p IPS display. I could have gone with a 1080p, and I used the 720p display for a few days to determine if I would want to use a 1080p display on a 12.5" notebook, the answer was no. After everything, I have ended up with a premium laptop that is light, portable, and excellent performance for less than most Chromebooks. I have installed Kubuntu 19.10 and couldn’t be happier. Everything on this laptop functions, and it even has a backlight keyboard.

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