I've finally bought a thinkpad

25-7-2024 14:23

This is t480s. Bought it used for around 200$, with a half-dead battery and installed Arch Linux with KDE right away. It is en route to becoming my side-projects/backup machine.

It was my first time(s) installing Arch. I started with just guides with commands, so my first install took something like 2 hours, but subsequent installs were a lot more quick(as short as 7 mins), due to me discovering archinstall. Arch is very light and since I already have some experience with Linux(3+ years of daily desktop + VPSes), I didn't really encounter any issues with usage.

However, there is a problem with Linux(might be with the laptop itself) - the headphone jack is not working, and neither is integrated mic(so I'm left with just the speakers😭). I've tried multiple solutions(and different audio systems - both pipewire and pulseaudio) but none of them worked for me unfortunately.

Guess I'm gonna have to ask the forums...

There's also the fact that I haven't checked if the jack worked on Windows(laptop was sent to me with Win10 preinstalled).

My main machine currently is an HP Omen 15(2021?) with RTX 3060. It's 15.6' and quite a bit heavier than the thinkpad. t480s is 14' and with no discrete graphics it's really light. I've already tried taking it outdoors, and the experience was okay'ish.

Regarding desktop experience, I've installed Moe Dark theme, zsh with starship, kitty terminal and really enjoying the result. My only problem currently is that ssh agent is not running in background by default.

Also - auto-cpufreq for better battery life.

Overall, it's fun to toy around with it, probably gonna upgrade the battery and ram. Is it a good laptop for regular usage under windows? Doubt. Good laptop for Linux? The answer seems to be yes.