maybe search for system76 too. I found one on my local craigslist.

loving my recently acquired T480. not the fastest by any means, but solid and great keyboard. plus non-soldered memory allows for upgrades. got mine off craigslist for 120, a steal.

plateaued since when? if you look at the second half of the graph, 2022 forward, it looks more steep to me.

I take it ‘geometric mean’ is the geometric mean of ‘statcounter’ and ‘steam’? What’s the specific source of those latter two measures? For instance, when I look at linux usage on the statcounter website I get more like 1.5%, not 4%.

they only offer the one laptop, a T480. Not an HP, Dell, etc. Ongoing fixes to the UEFI and BIOS code are irrelevant as this has libreboot instead. That’s like saying you’re missing out on windows updates if you run linux.

And anyway the T480 is at end of life:

This product is no longer being actively supported by development (End of Development Support) and no further software updates will be provided.

I’ve had good luck with an X201, W520, and T480 - all thinkpads. Haven’t tried any of the lower end lenovo models. I got my W520 new and my other ones off craigslist.

If you’re looking to get a preinstalled OS and from a refurb vendor, an interesting option would be buying from libreboot. Debian/KDE by default or you can choose your own distro. Libreboot is a good cause, and sales funds the project. You’ll have the most secure bios on the block.

love mine I got on craigs for cheap. works great and upgraded to 32G with memory from my old dead laptop.

I’m following the progress of nixos on snapdragon, but its still a bit early for me. Audio kind of working but might damage your speakers, webcam not working, crashing on 64G version but not 32G, etc. Also some funny business about needing windows for firmware or something. These issues are getting resolved but aren’t completely solid yet IMO.

Don’t know where things stand on the more mainstream distros but I’m guessing its probably similar.

I switched to nixos years ago. Its better now than it ever has been as far as available packages and etc. But it does present issues if you get off the beaten path - the “now you have two problems” issue. For instance:

• if software is not packaged for nixos already, you won’t be able to follow the ‘build from source’ directions on its github page or etc. You have to make a nix package or at least development environment first. That can be tricky and you won’t have help from the software dev.
• If software downloads exes that require libraries to be in a certain standard location, well, they won’t work. Android studio for instance, downloads compilers and so forth. There are workarounds, mostly, but it can take a while to discover and get working and I’m sure many people give up. Again, the android studio software and documentation will be no help at all.

That said, more and more projects are supporting nix, and nixpkgs has gotten really big. I think they support more packages than any other distro now.

I use nixos. But the package manager its based on, nix, can be used on other OSes.

nix can deal with this kind of problem. Does take disk space if you’re going to have radically different deps for different apps. But you can 100% install firefox from 4 years ago and new firefox on the same system and they each have the deps they need.

Loving my T480 I got recently. Performance is meh but upgraded the memory to 32g and works good enough. Plus it was cheap on craigslist so I don’t have to worry about it too much.

My current desktop is xmonad + xfce in no-desktop mode. Almost no configuration in xmonad, all the stuff like monitor layout and mouse props is handled by xfce. And yes my laptop that I used it on for 6-7 years is now broken (ish) so I’ve already unlocked this acheivement.

I do feel slightly guilty about not moving to wayland, but I’m not sure how that would improve my experience at all. I did hear xfce is almost there on wayland, so maybe I can move to sway + xfce on wayland at some point.