And by outdated, like 2015. Old E7440s or even older work great with added memory. New battery and you have a nice laptop out of the e waste pile. The only weak spot are drives, SSDs are expensive so to stay cheap you might have to use old spinny in there.

Yea i wanted to give it a shot since ive been thinking of switching to mint on my desktop. Right now I run kubuntu on my main machine and for the past few years its been great, and the only thing thats really kept me has been KDE plasma. I may just bite the bullet and install plasma in mint cause so far, I'm still not a fan of cinnamon.

Mostly for compatibility and ease of use. I don't wanna fiddle with things if I don't have to. Wanted it to be stable. Ive also been thinking about switching to mint on my main machine so this is also kind of a test run. I tried mint years ago but it didn't work well for me back then.

I hear that a lot but I got a new e14 amd on special it was so cheap. It's not the most powerful but i put 32gbs of ram and a 2tb nvme in it runs arch on it and its a cool little machine.

The ram and the hard drive cost more than the laptop. Would I have bought this thing for retail? Prob not, I resent giving money to Lenovo directly.

I dunno, I run Debian and my GRUB looks like this:

Because there is very little overlap between “programmers who design the systems to be as efficient and reliable as possible” and “UX designers who consider elegance and ease of use, even if it means the install is a few extra MB in size”.

Tons of FOSS UIs tend to fall into one of three categories:

1. CLI. Maybe a third-party GUI exists.
2. Laughably horrendous monstrosities that make early 90’s websites look good
3. A direct ripoff of a paid software that has actual UX designers.

It’s because the people designing the FOSS aren’t UX designers, so they either make their best guess at it (the laughably horrendous choice) or they just copy whatever paid software they’re trying to replace.

There is no software that does theming for GRUB that doesn't break it badly and was stopped mid development and GRUB 2.0 takes deep knowledge of how it works to theme it without breaking it.

Hell the little bit of theming they added to Ventoy has them slowing GRUB updates to make sure that it is tested and tested again before they roll it out and break everyone's install without knowing it.

I plan on doing it but I really don't have time for it right now or any time in the future.

It’s because GRUB needs to survive when everything else is broken. GRUB is the first and last standing soldier.

And there you are, right on the raggedty edge. Well done, Sir or Madam.

You can absolutely rice your GRUB install. I haven't used it in a hot minute, but I definitely had ones in the past that were themed.

My Thinkpad (X201) can't even play Terraria well but I love it. :)

Still got an X201 somewhere. That thing learned me Linux, got me through school and found me a good job at a time when all I had was a backpack and that computer.

Some day I shall switch it on and update it.

A T440p running Antergos got me through college. I regret selling it since that thing served me well 🫡

Mint is great, LMDE is even better; same newbie friendliness, away from Ubuntu specifics

Be careful of USB C ports. They are unreliable but absolutely required to charge.

Yep. Personally my first choice is the t490. Theres so many in great condition.

I like to imagine the IT debt in some office building buying and hording t490s just to be sure they don't lose their budget next year.

Ive actually been using Linux for a few years now, but I needed a laptop so figured this would be a good choice. But I am enjoying Linux very much!

480s has a touchscreen? I need to check mine...

"Excuse me, are y'all with the cult?"

"We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes open source"

"Yeah, this is it"

I am home, brother. :)

Great minds think alike haha. Good for you brother. Hope it works well for you.

I followed this guide, worked right out of the box:

https://github.com/SeniorMatt/How-to-enable-fingerprint-in-Linux-Mint-for-T480

T480

On thinkpads it is in the corner of the screen.

T480 but I'm wondering 7th or 8th gen Intel. Both options were offered.