A Thinkpad running windows is just disgraceful. Good hardware deserves good software
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Exactly. Mine shipped w/ Windows, but it never ran Windows (at least I never did). Installed Linux day 1.
What are the options? Linux is meh on desktop. I love Linux and FreeBSD for servers but for desktop duty I still find Windows to be vastly superior.
Use Qubes like a normal person you freak! That's the option.
I ran over mine with my car (by accident, of course) and it survived, I'm still using it even though I had to take some acrews out to relieve the pressure from the fan because it was hitting the case and sometimes I have to fold it a bit to the other side so it doesn't make noises.
So I guess I'm the second one
I wouldn't even call the left side a "tech" enthusiast. More like a fad or clout enthusiast...
I am the second one.
Battle scars are customizations.
My Thinkpad has survived drops from the countertop, kids standing on it, and the USB-C charge port is wearing out from years of kids fighting over it. It's still running fine, though there's certainly some surface damage.
It's going on 8 years now and still running fine. Sucker refuses to die, and I refuse to replace it until it does.
Tech is a tool to me and tools shouldn't be pristine and unused.
Any time I get a new toy, I do try to keep it a shiny as possible for as long as I can, but yeah eventually the battle scars come through and then it's a different story.
Tools should be used for sure.
Still never a reason to carelessly step on cables, toss/shove the computer instead of set it down, etc.
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Hey treat your stuff however you want. But generally tools are meant to wear out from their intended use. Ususlly, the better you treat your tools the more use you get out of them.
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There's a third.
I would argue this is the just the second kind
I took a dremel to my $20 case to install a front fan to cool my NAS drives. Taped that sucker right to the front bit of the face, and ran it that way for years.
It's not quite as hardcore as this, so I'm not sure if I qualify for the second or third type.
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So I started going to University recently, and the amount of people I've had actively chastise me for how I treat my laptop has been shocking.
This is a tool to get things done, it's not some precious gem, I bought a cheap laptop with the expectation that it's going to get gross and crusty and I'll have to hose it down once a year, I'm going to wing it around and drop it and clean the screen with my sleeve.
Treating a telescope like a jackhammer isn't going to work well.
They just haven't figured out your jackhammer just looks a lot like their telescope.
Craftspeople treat their tools with respect and consideration.
My tap and die set sit on a shelf, my lathe is in the shop. I've dropped my hammer from 150 feet because the tether broke and the most upsetting part was climbing the ladder down and back up.
It depends on whether you view it as a lathe or a hammer. My nice computer is at home, my computer that I sit in the park under a tree and code on, then set it on the grass while it compiles is in my bag.
It may be news to you but generally people cannot tell apart semen from just crusty dirt.
It’s probably why your laptop has been such a hit around the campus.
I don’t think even the bioengineers are brave enough to take a sample
My old MacBook was first too shiny and new to put stickers on, then it lived so long that I didn't want to waste stickers on a machine that I'd need to retire. It made it ten years before having weird bootloop issues.
To try to counteract my own neuroses I went sticker mad on its replacement immediately. It also helps with easily telling which way is up at a glance (I don't know how many times I had to rotate the old one when I went to open it).
You know, aside from the i9 MacBook pros, these are really resilient machines that will last quite a while. They don’t deserve the hate they get. They easily outlast gamer laptops that bake themselves to death.
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The scratches on my thinkpad aren't flaws. They're battle scars!
Y'all hatin on the first image, but that's me 🥺
So I'm hating you now
I admire your conviction
That's me for about a week with any new device. Then I slowly get more and more lax, until eventually I'm the one on the right.
Buy used, best feature is that it comes with scratches so you don't have to be so careful
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I am the left one until the first scratch appears, at that point i manage to do worse than the Right one.
Looks at hp stream that's been choking for 5 years in cnc shavings.
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I've actually ran a server for a few weeks with a heatsink just sitting on the CPU with a dab of thermal paste.
I was waiting for mounting hardware. Thankfully it was a PGA so mounting pressure didn't match much.
it better be getting ready to be linuxed
No I was planning on using it with Nvidia drivers and secure boot.
Only a little bit. Genuinely go grab a laptop and try to get everything up and running with Nvidia drivers, secure boot, full disk encryption, and tpm unlock (server application, no typing password allowed).
It's not particularly easy. (Except, somewhat ironically, with arch).
My experience was following the fedora instructions immediately broke the boot, following the opensuse instructions worked up until I had an unexpected power loss and then it wouldn't boot anymore (truly bizarre as the thing that lost power was the external zfs drives not the os drive). Only arch had a fully sane and functional set of instructions.
Or just avoid nvidia in the first place and it mostly just works.
I've done it with Suse more than once, but not with ZFS. Using ZFS with Linux still tends to be a crapshoot. I've given up on nvidia; if they want to be money grubbing assholes they can get other people money, but not mine.
https://blog.entrostat.com/installing-nvidia-drivers-on-a-linux-laptop-with-secure-boot-enabled/
That's not been a problem for a while now
Oh I know, and as of 2025 fedora even has it built in from what I read. We are truly living in the future.
One isn't a tech enthusiast, but a tech idiot.
Yeah, who hooks a portable generator up to their laptop without using a surge protector??
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You're just gatekeeping.
ThinkPad with a generator? Nothing wrong with that
maybe add LoRa, get a ham license and add some packet radio or digital modes and you have a neat disaster setup.
MacBook that you don't want to scuff? Well, I'm not that precious with my gear, but you do you. Many Mac laptops last a very long time, and the performance of modern Apple silicon is really, really impressive
and you have UNIX out of the box. Plenty for a tech enthusiast to like.
The one on the right needs a surge protector.
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