Every Laptop I've had written from memory. i'm neither a writer nor a tech writer, all opinions reflect that of my employer
My first laptop, bought it for high school. I chose it purely because I was internet-poisoned and wanted to try out the thinkpad meme and also didn't want to pay for a windows license key. I had like $250 and bought a used one off of ebay for roughly that much. Other than some previous dualbooting on the family computer (teehee), this laptop was where I had my first serious exploration of linux. Crunchbang (R.I.P.) ended up being the distro I settled on for a few years and deepened the desktop customization bug i originally picked up on Windows
From there I distrohopped some more before getting to Arch, which became my go-to distro for general use and continues to be the distribution I generally best understand. You would think this would make Arch my favorite distro, but its more of a stockholm-syndrome situation atp. My feelings on Arch are complicated and I think I will leave it at that for now.
ANYway, this is where I started to get a little bit of a better understanding of linux systems--at least from the user side of things--and sorta start to understand the smaller, more digestible, political-slogan sounding parts of popular linux architecture. "Everything is a file," and so on. This is where I finally understood the hermetic wisdom of rtfm culture. This is where I would I swear to god sit in the front of english class with vim open taking notes or fucking around with xrandr and whatever handled key events at the time trying to get the rotate screen button to work. I was so powerful.
Jesus okay back to the laptop itself the thinkpad x201t has been the only 2-in-1/tablet-like experience I've even remotely enjoyed. The pen was sturdy, well designed, and felt very secure in its little holder thing. With that said, I imagine that if I was looking for a good drawing experience I would be super disappointed. It served my purposes well and was fast enough for osu!. The screen--when closed OR flipped onto the keyboard in tablet mode--locked to the body super creatively. The latch that held the screen to the body could be popped through a groove in the lid to pop out whichever side necessary to lock the screen in place. Just super thoughtful design, really cool stuff.
The x201t (and most other X series thinkpads from that era) has a huge knobbly battery that I hated at first but learned to love. The little feet in the back gave it a lot of stability that I often find myself missing in modern laptops. The battery was actually pretty decent given its age, and tools like TLP and Powertop helped me squeeze as much out of it as possible. Finally, the battery lock mechanism (yes! hotswappable batteries!) is sturdy as hell and still functions properly to this day
this laptop is where i started my the tradition of naming my computers, and this one is named louise :)
I hardly ever had to repair this one. The only repairs I've had to make are to the keys, who's plastic had become very brittle in storage conditions prior to my ownership. For some reason, two of the three I had to replace were the same key, the letter F.
Louise's motherboard failed when I was in college. She does still run fine after start-up, but we rarely get to that point. I may replace the motherboard one day.
I have a lot of feelings around this laptop and the sense of achievement and freedom that came with learning stuff on it at a time where I really needed both.
Without being hyperbolic the stupid thinkpad meme likely shaped my career in tech than my college classes did (I picked the wrong major and never changed it lmao). It taught me to go out looking for more tools when I became unable to solve a given problem with my the set of tools I already have and understand. As it turns out, this pattern is generally good practice for significant chunk of tech labor.
My first Windows (mostly, I wiped it and threw linux on there during most breaks or if I didn't need a 25 year old pspice clone or lockdown browser) laptop. Needed it for college. It's fine. It broke like every three seconds and has to be held together with tape. Sent in on warranty twice for complete motherboard and minor system failures. Support was impossible to navigate or depend on. The keyboard was fine but the bar is in hell when it comes to laptops from this specific era.
It ended up irreparably failing a third time in college--this time an issue with power delivery, nice--and I decided to call it a day. By this I mean I continued using it for several years, but begrudgingly.
As long as you don't pick it up after you turn it on (no idea) it it runs well enough to be a pretty beefy if not power-hungry server. I ran a minecraft server as well as some docker containers on this for a long time with zero issues
Back to the short stints where I did throw linux on this one: It was pretty bad. The software multiplexer for the discrete nvidia graphics card, Bumblebee, was in its infancy and I didn't understand any of the underlying systems at the time. I did get it working, but it was a nightmare to get right and I ended up paying the price for meddling with systems I didn't understand whenever anything needed fixing. I ended up disabling the discrete gpu entirely in favor of the integrated graphics lmao. The fingerprint reader was completely unsupported (has since been fixed!) too, but I never had a need for it.
I don't want to talk or think about how much this laptop cost but I got a 30% discount from the manufacturer on this one because I told them i work at coca cola lmao
As for the name, the linux installations on this one was where I standardized naming my devices after flower species; this one was petuina for a short time, I don't remember the other names I had for it
I got this one in like my Junior year of college at a swap meet in Atlanta for $20 and I fucking LOVE this thing dude. It's completely unusable, the screen sucks, the entire keyboard bounces when you type on it, and the trackpad is... like built into the surface of the actual body of the laptop which is just such an odd design choice. And it's a 32-bit intel atom processor. There are like 3 distros tops that this guy can still run in current year and the CMOS battery mysteriously drains every month, but god damn does it have character. The tiny 11" lid has an Embossed, silver, italic script "Eeepc" on a field of very sparkly deep blue plastic. The hinges are suprisingly solid, and the keyboard (other than the horrendous flexing) is well laid-out and doesnt feel cramped despite its size. The built-in wifi card sucks, and the process to swap it out requires removing almost every other component in the laptop (same with the CMOS battery). It runs NixOS at the moment, but I think I may go back to Void if I were to need to use this laptop again. Alpine also ran decently well on this laptop, but
I'm on a linux tangent again lets get back to the hardware. I just love the size of this guy. I can very easily palm it (im equipped with some pretty sizable grippers so ymmv). It has an impressive number of still useful ports and a hotswappable battery with a really sturdy lock mechanism. The reparability may not be the best out there (it still clears anything modern by a mile), but the RAM can be accessed by removing one (1) screw on the bottom. great stuff
it's not as durable, light, or fast as any of the other laptops i've collected over time, I just think its cool.
This one is named pentuina! the other petunia only existed for a short time and is not canon
This is what I use now! I essentially just wanted my x201t back but didn't really need the 2-in-1 or touch capabilities. I bought it on ebay a few years ago for $40, still runs great. I use it now for light terminal work, no X server. Aside from a few ACPI issues with TLP that I'm still sorting out, NixOS has been really, really great on this machine. I really love it, it delivers on its claims. Truly neat shit, but I only really feel like I understand the nix language when I'm really high. There's a definite learning curve to it. The documentation isn't where it could be, but not for lack of trying; my handwavey take that I'm not going to back up is that how both NixOS and its community works is completely orthogonal to like. how 90% of documentation is written and consumed (and in a good way! there's just a learning curve to this, too). The recent "Nix Flakes", their inception, their implementation, and the user-community reception/documentation is a great case study of this. I would likely butcher an attempt to elaborate further so I'll return to the laptop for now.
Although my heart will always be with the x201t, this laptop is better for my use case in pretty much every way. Its light, cheap, has great keyboard, boasts a good number of still-relevant ports, great reparability, surprising durability, you get the idea. Oh and the i series is massively cheaper, they're more or less exact copies of the x201 but with a shittier cpu.
Broke naming convention on this one and just named it flower
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