could get a reconditioned Thinkpad from minifree.org/?

I don't know about the market in your location, but I think in most places the second hand market for ThinkPads is particularly strong due to the number of them second hand from the business market. In the UK there are loads of refurbished ones sold on Amazon marketplace for very good prices. I've not bought a new one in well over a decade. A bit like new cars, new laptops are a bit of a rip off.

It may be worth investigating that to narrow down your options and find a ThinkPad that fits your specs.

I got a reasonable refurb dell latitude from a nearby micro center a couple months back (12th gen i5, 16g ram, 1080p) for 300$. I'd look at similar refurb deals.

It's fine, btw. Drains too much power on standby, but ah well.

just got a refurbished t480s for about $250 on ebay and I'm super happy with it. Put pop_os on the old t430 (which I also bought refurbished 7 years ago and ran like a champ pretty much the whole time) and its like having two new laptops!

Glad you already are with a thinkpad. Imho still the best choice. I'd start at looking at newer T-Series Thinkpads. Touch display obviously is a deal breaker and a persistent property of the device, biometry you mostly can just ignore and decide to not-use. I use it (fingerprint) for power-on security as it is not worse than a "bios password" or whatever that's called today. But that's not a customizable option to worry about, just turn it off. hth Good luck!

Not to add one more choice, but I really like my @frameworkcomputer.

They're designed to be easily repairable, upgradable and I run Ubuntu pretty flawlessly on it, pretty much straight out of the box.

Strong recommend.

Lenovo makes good product, just don't get a Yoga model, the hinges fail and they won't cover them under warranty.

I really like the HP laptops. Had a battery issue years ago and they swapped it 18 months out of warranty. They are sturdy and last for many years.

Wow, Framework laptops look awesome!! Thank you for the multiple recommendations, Fediverse! I'll look at this more tomorrow when I (hopefully?) recover from decision fatigue.

used vs new: I know you're not in the US but if US prices influence CA prices based on your experience, the potential US tariffs might say go with new/higher end now or soon and milk it for 4-5 years til we see if sanity reasserts itself down here.

You could even name it The GOAT for the plan to milk it

I just splurged (well, my teaching fund splurged) on a system76, which came with ubuntu 22 installed. (They also have their own linux variant called pop os, but you can choose ubuntu.)

Before that, my last two laptops (and my desktop) had been Dells, which have worked very well for me (typing on the less old Dell now). People say things about Dell, but I put Ubuntu on all of them and never had any problems.

i also have a much-loved t480 and the mechanical parts under the hood are sounding a little strained lately.

I’ll be that annoying person to recommend a Mac: ever since Apple Silicon, they’re really unbeatable in terms of speed and battery life. A real step change in compute per $ and per Watt. I’ve also used Linux in the past and switching to macOS was actually quite nice.

@Uilebheist @valhalla @yvan

can confirm that new ThinkPads are SHIT. Mine lost the USB-C port after a few months, and now has lost the builtin keyboard and the trackpoint keys. Colleague of mine had to send hers for repair (out of warranty) because a key got stuck and couldn't be reset. And I've seen other similarly negative reports here on Fedi.

@oblomov @Uilebheist @valhalla ah, dang, that'll really be an end of an era then 😔

@yvan @oblomov @Uilebheist @valhalla Oh that's very sad. But thanks for the heads-up!