Not a Thinkpad, but here’s my story. Last year I’ve bought myself a 2017 Acer Travelmate B117 for 13 euros to learn Linux, to see if I was ready to make the switch from Windows. I thought of it as a throwaway toy.
It has a Pentium N3710, 4GB of RAM and 128GB eMMC storage with a 720p display. It came with Windows 10. Ran like shit. One tab of Firefox and it was a slideshow.
So I installed openSUSE first. It wasn’t very fast, but battery life was 8 hours and Firefox worked fine. I learned to like it, ended up buying a mini PC for experimenting with self-hosting. That also went well. So I started experimenting with installing Arch Linux on this laptop (as it’s hard, but teaches you a lot about Linux). On like the 7th try it finally worked!
I run Arch on all my computers ever since, except the home server, which runs Debian for stability. This 13 euro e-waste of a laptop became my daily driver because I love how portable it is.
Thank you Linux and open-source devs. You’ve brought back my love for computers, while saving old devices from the bin.
Not a Thinkpad, but here’s my story. Last year I’ve bought myself a 2017 Acer Travelmate B117 for 13 euros to learn Linux, to see if I was ready to make the switch from Windows. I thought of it as a throwaway toy.
It has a Pentium N3710, 4GB of RAM and 128GB eMMC storage with a 720p display. It came with Windows 10. Ran like shit. One tab of Firefox and it was a slideshow.
So I installed openSUSE first. It wasn’t very fast, but battery life was 8 hours and Firefox worked fine. I learned to like it, ended up buying a mini PC for experimenting with self-hosting. That also went well. So I started experimenting with installing Arch Linux on this laptop (as it’s hard, but teaches you a lot about Linux). On like the 7th try it finally worked!
I run Arch on all my computers ever since, except the home server, which runs Debian for stability. This 13 euro e-waste of a laptop became my daily driver because I love how portable it is.
Thank you Linux and open-source devs. You’ve brought back my love for computers, while saving old devices from the bin.