[donquichotte]

I recently installed NetBSD on a Thinkpad T430s, it is surprisingly snappy and usable, except when firefox is running.

With i3wm, tmux and helix with clangd it is a capable development machine with a surprisingly modern feel, only the compile times give away that the machine is from the early 2010s. Even WiFi is working, and pkgsrc is fast and well-stocked with the newest software.

[gorgonical]

It's funny to hear someone describe my daily driver personal laptop in the same way as a 380Z. I use Slackware with Xfce4 and except for the lower screen resolution (1360x768) I have never noticed that it's not "modern." I even have a new battery so it gets 6-9 hours of use again.

Like you said, the giveaway is the poor performance, but if you're a systems developer that usually isn't a problem anyway. Emacs, C, assembly, some Chisel and Forth are all that I write on it.

[ofalkaed]

A T42 with slackware and notion wm was my daily driver until around 2015, never really felt a need to get something newer and only did because I wanted something smaller/lighter for portability so I get a cheap $250 11e Thinkpad. Used the T42 regularly until it finally died in 2021 or 22. Miss the 4:3 screen and tiny trackpad. In just shy of 20 years the only issues I had with the T42 was a dead fan. Now I have an X13, 16 cores and NVMe still running slackware and notion, it flies. That $250 11e is still going strong, has survived 3 bike crashes and it shows.

[ruthmarx]

I still rock a Latitude E6220 from 2011 or so after my main one broke and I just never replaced it.

It had 4gb ram, upgraded it to 8gb for $10 via Amazon, running Alpine with awesomewm and it works perfectly fine, firefox runs fine, compiling works fine, VLC works fine, etc.

Even Windows 10 ran on it fine. Really, CPU's haven't changed so much in the last 10 years, the focus has all bee on graphics.

[1n4007]

The T430 is a modern machine with a Core I (and modern Lenovo keyboard...). The S variants are always a bit slower with their low power cores, but it's still very much a modern thing - you'd expect it to all work.