[Happpy]

I'd love to replace my thinkpad. But I need/want things that seem unavailable.

* trackpoint + buttons (can be without touchpad, disabled anyway) * full keyboard * strong durable * removable battery * 4k screen * ecc 64-128gb * rj45 * lots of ports * hardware switches to disable: networking, camera, mic,..

Thinkpad's are move farther away each year. I hope some company will fill the gap.

[unionpivo]

I was/am thinkpad user also. I have migrated to desktops. They are cheap enough to have one at the office and one at home.

Sure the above wont work for everybody, but if you are like me, you unpacked the laptop at home and at work each day at exactly the same space, where all the cables and extra monitors were.

I used to use laptop in coffee shops and outdoors, but nowadays between phone, and tablets (wel phone and kindle in my case) I almost never feel the need.

Buy silent box, mobo for overclocking and underclock it for extra silence, and throw the box under the table.

Still have my laptop, but its mostly just "backup" and in case I travel somewhere, but honestly I don't care about it as much

[pedrocr]

With the quality of networks these days it may pay off to just have a single beefy desktop at work or home and a very simple desktop in the other location that you just use to remote in to the first. Keeps the environment consistent over time and even allows leaving long running computations running and picking them up later. Two remote stations and a headless server in a rack somewhere may even be better. No worries about noise and cooling.

[trepatudo]

Exactly what I did. 2 desktops at home and office, sync via dotfiles for OS config, documents via Nextcloud and src via git.

A laptop (xps 13 9360) for traveling or working in remote places.

Even have a yubikey on each desktop and one for travel. All storing the ssh keys.

I don't use the laptop for months, open it and update the packages and dotfiles before going for a travel and that's it. Ready to go.

[rvanlaar]

My main reason to go for a laptop was that I wanted to continue coding where I left off and not have to worry about differing settings and system configuration.

Did you solve those problems? and if so how?

[intrasight]

I too went desktop route. Built what I want - including lots of ECC memory. I too have a laptop for backup and travel (and a Chromebook used as RDP client).

Sync isn't an issue. All work is on VMs, and they get backed up every day to my Synology.

My backup laptop is a 6 year old Thinkpad, which hasn't been out of it's bag in over a year.

[albertzeyer]

The downside with this is extra effort to keep them in sync. Depending on what you do, syncing can be easy (or even trivial if you do everything remote anyway) or more annoying.

[samstave]

>>>*laptop at home and at work each day at exactly __the same space__, where all the cables and extra monitors were.*

Nope. Actually, just like with my phone chargers, I like to have a laptop charger in all the spaces I like to compute.. I like to have a charger in my bedroom, my living room and in the garage.

I used to have this for all my machines - though I now have a new HP Omen (bad ass machine) - but I only have one charger for it currently.

I havent touched my ipad in a really long time.

But here is a tip - this super light and super cheep USB screen is AMAZING to have with a laptop:

(This thing was $69 when I bought it - but its now $99 but still - a USB only monitor is fantastic.

https://www.amazon.com/AOC-e1659Fwu-1366x768-Brightness-3-0-...

What I do, is I make it the top monitor - and I have this TV Tray stand that is at the perfect level for me to have my laptop on my lap, a tray or a TV tray, and then I have the AOC monitor on this stand and I just move up to click on that mon...

And this is dope because during this pandemic, I am trying to take every free training I can get my digital hands around.

https://digitaldefynd.com/free-udemy-courses/

So I have the training vid on the top screen and then I can use whatever program(s) I need on the laptop...

Blender courses are a good example of how this works great. The point is to have the two screens stacked vertically so that you only move your eyes up and down and dont have to turn your neck...

[astorgard]

I'm on the same boat as you: my ideal laptop would be an x220/x230 on the outside with a 1440p display and a modern CPU on the inside.

I can't understand why Thinkpads are moving away from this absolutely perfect design in the name of... slickness?

Why are laptops with a minimal (or non-existing) touchpad so difficult to find? Once you start using the trackpoint your wrists feel incredibly relaxed at all times.

Why do so few vendors offer RJ45 ports? When in the lab, I find my self needing one almost daily.

Why this trend of including keyboards with shorter and shorter travel distance?

There was a campaign to bring attention to all these details a few years ago which (surprisingly!) resulted in Lenovo releasing the "Thinkpad 25 anniversary edition" [1] which ticked most (but not all) of my boxes and which is unfortunately no longer available.

Do people really prefer the new design trends? Am I out of touch with reality?

[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/outletus/laptops/thinkpad/think...

[pengaru]

The X220 is nowhere near an "absolutely perfect" design, it's way too wide. I still use one as my daily driver, but come on. The screen bezels are huge, the keyboard stretched to fill its wide footprint, and the power plug juts out the back where it gets stressed against the floor in any cross-legged, or other tilted back usage setting.

The X61s was far closer to an absolutely perfect design, it just needed less plastic in the chassis. Things started going downhill with the X201s in the transition to wide aspect ratio displays, and X220/X230 arrived at full retard on that trajectory.

[numpad0]

Likelihood of people actually using products they buy is overestimated, I think.

Lots of games on Steam has achievements for extremely simple tasks, such as launching the game for the first time or playing it for five minutes, and popularity of those is typically around 82.5% and 75% respectively among audiences for most popular titles.

IOW, 17.5% of PC game enthusiasts pay for a game and immediately put it on a shelf and don’t even double click on the icon. 25% reaches past the loading screen. Of all purchasers, maybe 10% reaches the final boss or end of the storyline. Potentially less.

A person who has issues with a mainstream laptop for its lack of an Ethernet port few years into ownership, who knows how many of those exist in the whole world?

[pedrocr]

The X1 nano is the same width and height as a X220 but half the thickness and significantly lighter. The X13 is very close to that too on the lower end. What would you change in those?

Having been a user of the old X lines throughout the years the current X/T and X1 lines seem like a definite improvement to me. And I also use the trackpoint exclusively.

[yoz-y]

I think there is definitely space to at least offer some SKUs with all that, albeit at a high markup (kinda like the Mac Pro).

However I think that yes, most people (including me) prefer the new to the old. Eg.: I dislike full keyboards because it shifts my hands to a side and moves the mouse further away. I tried track points but I find touchpads superior. I don’t need an RJ45 because even if I wanted to use it, I’d much rather have it on a USB-C dongle with pass through power, so I only have one cable to disconnect when moving around. And call me crazy, even though I use a mechanical external keyboard most of the time, I actually like typing on the butterfly keyboard more than on other laptop keyboards I have and had.

[Liskni_si]

Not a solution that scales, but if you really want a modern CPU variant of the x230, check this: https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x330-pricing-list/

They also have the T25 frankenpad: https://www.xyte.ch/shop/t25-frankenpad-kit/ and https://www.xyte.ch/thinkpads/t25-frankenpad/

[criddell]

Have you looked at the P series laptops?

> Why do so few vendors offer RJ45 ports?

I'm guessing that because laptops are portable machines, almost nobody ever uses the network port and if you need one, you can use an adapter with the USB port.

[LeifCarrotson]

It's worse than you think: They are somewhat hamstrung in their hardware decisions by the current offerings from those Apple/Ultrabook chasing OEMs, but in this case they jumped the shark entirely and removed the 2.5" drive caddy.

The nearly identical Clevo NL51RU/NL50RU [1] has a 2.5" drive caddy but a 36 Wh battery. Take a look at the internal photo of the System76 unit at [2]. It's the same laptop. Heck, they didn't even bother removing the boss and brass insert for the 2.5" drive retaining screw by the left speaker.

System76 is not an OEM, they whitelabel and have tweaks made to Clevo/Sager laptops. I think they do a great service to the Linux community with PopOS and driver development/compatibility to make those into machines where Linux "just works" out of the box, don't get me wrong.

This obsession with thin-and-light goes completely counter to the whole point of "Our laptops’ guts are fully accessible!". They say they've got a tactile keyboard, to fit in 20mm thin right on top of the heat sink for the high-power Ryzen processor and discrete graphics I think I'm pretty safe in assuming it's a pathetic <1mm key-travel scissor unit.

1" thick or more is not too much. You could fit in all the ports, as well as an 80 Wh battery, and cooling to run at boost frequencies for more than 20ms. You don't have to match the dimensions of a Macbook Air and be able to slice tomatoes with the wrist rest.

[1]: https://laptopwithlinux.com/wp-content/uploads/Clevo-NL51RU-... from https://laptopwithlinux.com/product/clevo-nl51ru/ [2]: https://assets.system76.com/products/pang10/internal.png

[kitsunesoba]

> 1" thick or more is not too much.

I think it depends a lot on an individual's needs. Like in my case, a recent laptop purchasing decision revolved around qualities that make a laptop particularly good at being a laptop — that is, high portability, low/no noise, little/no heat. Power and ports were a cherry on top because I already have another machine that fills those needs.

In that situation, 1" isn't necessarily too thick, but it is negatively impacting its functionality as a laptop, if only because added thickness implies added weight (especially for sizes larger than 13").

With that said, ultraportables shouldn't exist at the cost of models more oriented toward power and flexibility… they should be an option alongside more traditional laptops.

[jdmichal]

I agree with your general sentiment. (He says typing on his Dell XPS 13...) But it also seems to me that ditching a drive bay to get a bigger battery is the definition of a design decision and not in any way jumping the shark.

[kop316]

This may interest you:

https://www.xyte.ch/

I have a thinkpad x2100 and it is a great laptop.

[xbar]

Thank you for this. I look at every System76 announcement dreaming of this screen size, this keyboard, this trackpad.

I am glad I am not the only one.

[smoldesu]

Thanks for sharing this, it looks outright incredible. I love my x201, but it's starting to feel a little long in the tooth these days... I may end up getting one of these. What's the battery life like?

[qudat]

I've been looking around for a good linux laptop dev machine and am starting to resolve around the idea of having multiple desktops. It's cheaper with better support for replacing parts as well as linux.

The laptop market churns way too much for my liking and I feel like the second I move away from my macbook pro (work) I'm going to be disappointed with the quality.

When it comes to development, my goal is to be able to ssh into my linux box and use that for most development (tmux + vim). That plus ZeroTier and I now have access to my dev machine from wherever.

Even on large codebases written in Typescript, vim + plugins are "good enough."

macbook pro + live inside an ssh terminal seems to be working well enough for me.

[COGlory]

The closest I came was my XPS 15 9560. The build quality and hardware was excellent. i5 + GTX 1050 + 8GB RAM + 256 GB NVME + Thunderbolt. Linux support was phenomenal, especially on a rolling release. After about 18 months of owning it, I upgraded the memory to 16GB and storage to 1 TB without any problems. Unfortunately, I ran into a few issues trying to use it as a work and home machine.

1) Mixed DPI is insanely bad on Linux, and that issue is amplified if you have Nvidia hardware. At least as of last month, Wayland and XWayland are basically unusable with Nvidia. Since the laptop screen is 4k, but I was using a Thunderbolt dock plugged into 2x1080p monitors, I'd have to turn off display scaling on the laptop, and, because I was stuck on X11 because Nvidia, I'd have to restart the laptop for the scaling change to take effect.

2) There was no Thunderbolt dock support for unlocking full disk encryption, so if you wanted FDE, you either had to unplug the laptop from the dock, open it, type the password and plug it back in every time you turn the laptop on, or just not used a Thunderbolt dock. This wouldn't be a big deal except I was restarting the laptop frequently when changing pretty much any display parameter.

3) There was no clear best practice for managing switchable graphics. There are options like Bumblebee that I never really figured out if they were working properly - especially for games. Then, Nvidia supposedly added a "primus-run" feature to the driver, but again, it seemed to just not work. Eventually I settled on "prime-select" but that involves rebooting every time you switch.

4) Selecting the Nvidia graphics disabled on-board audio. I had to either use USB or Bluetooth. I never figured this out despite countless hours of messing around with alsamixer. My best guess is that it was trying to direct everything over the HDMI out even though that wasn't plugged in. The Intel drivers were loaded, just every time I selected the Nvidia chip, the audio devices would disappear.

In the end, I settled on picking up an Acer Aspire refurbished from eBay. It has an i5 10400, 12GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD. I put a 1050 Ti in it without any problems. The total system ran me $500. It's much nicer. So the moral of the story is for me, if you do go Linux laptop, avoid Nvidia like the plague.

[Joeri]

I had the same problem. As lenovo seems set on making thinkpads more like macbooks I just embraced it and got the m1 macbook air instead of another thinkpad. It’s amazing, as long as I don’t need to repair it.

[tootie]

I would cry tears of joy to get a laptop with mouse buttons. Trackpad gestures are a gimmick and so much harder to user than buttons. Apple did it to be "bold" and everyone copied them.

[bydo]

Apple has only ever shipped single-button mice with their computers, so turning the whole trackpad into that button on their laptops was a pretty simple evolution. Gestures came much later.

[bscphil]

This is one of the reasons I still enjoy using my old XPS. The buttons are great: nice deep solid clicks. Even doing stuff like dragging windows around is so much better than on a touchpad-only design. (I've used Macbooks with the old "hinge" style touchpad, and they're even worse than using a double-tap-and-drag gesture, just because of the force needed to keep the button pressed.)

Given the number of people these days who don't even own a desktop, I don't understand why mouse buttons aren't the standard. With the XPS I can even play casual games while sitting on the couch. No need to move to a desk and dig a corded mouse of the drawer!

[deckard1]

I moved from Macbook to a ThinkPad (trackpoint+trackpad+mouse buttons+trackpad buttons).

I never used gestures. But I seriously miss inertia scrolling. You never realize how much a pain in the ass it is scrolling web pages until you don't have it. Firefox has it, but you have to turn on an environment variable to get it and it feels a bit weird to me. Chrome does not have it all on Linux. And the way they are implementing it means that every app has to reimplement inertia scrolling on its own. Sigh. At least you can hold down the middle mouse and use the trackpoint to swiftly scroll.

[spideymans]

>Trackpad gestures are a gimmick and so much harder to user than buttons.

They're not a gimmick if well implemented. Useful gestures are very dependant on deep software integration, however.

[bondant]

And is there anything as enduring and resistant as the thinkpads?

I accidentally spilled a glass of water on my old thinkpad w, and all I had to do was to replace the keyboard (happened twice). It also helped that I could find spare part easily online. Would it be possible with lesser-know brands? It also fell several time on the ground but never broke anything. I'm honestly very interested to know if there are laptops as durable as thinkpads.

[no-dr-onboard]

Sounds like you want something along the line of what Purism is offering. Not sure about ECC ram on a laptop. Haven't seen that one yet.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

[jude-]

The one thing that stops me from getting a Librem 14 is the utterly hateful decision to have a tiny right-shift key to the right of the up arrow. Like seriously wtf Purism?

[rozab]

Thinkpad P series has ECC

[driverdan]

Screen is only 1080p