I’m looking to mainly use it for school and was wondering if there’s any recommended distros out there for thinkpads.
Its a Lenovo Thinkpad T480.
ITT: Every distro
The question is so generic and open ended it’s not a surprise. The only filter on this is “runs well on ThinkPad” and “lightweight”, which are both up to interpretation
With 8 GB of RAM and 5500 CPU passmark points, that’s a good laptop for Linux Mint. Download their “edge” version of Mint, so you get the latest kernel (so it has more chances of supporting 100% that laptop).
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This @cheezits@lemmy.ca! I run Linux Mint on a T410 with 4 GB of Ram and a 250 GB SSD and the user experience is quite ok for normal day to day usage like playing light games, browsing and HD video streaming.
DE is more important than distro in regards to RAM. Ubuntu runs on a pi, it should be good on any computer
Dude, it’s upgradeable, just put 32Gb in.
If you got a Nvidia dGPU I recommend PopOS. It gave me the best energy options and ability to switch between iGPU and dGPU out of the box. It even found new firmware for my T480 and installed it without a hitch.
All of them would be fine, also what wireless card and does yours have a gpu. Iirc the 580 had an option for an mx150 so I wouldn’t be surprised if the 480 had one.
Intel wireless cards are well supported, others not so much
mint is nice but fedora KDE runs also pretty well on my thinkpad x1 yoga gen3
I daily a t480 with Manjaro and absolutely love it. It’s real snappy and even the hybrid graphics work flawlessly.
Debian. Hard to get more stable (to a fault, even) than Debian.
I use Debian stable on mine. I got 16gb of ram but tbh it’s never gone above six in real use, even with a windows vm running.
E: old thinkpad gang input: take the time to reapply thermal grease to the cpu at some point. It makes a huge difference.
What’s a “gang input”?
E: old thinkpad gang input: take the time to reapply thermal grease to the cpu at some point. It makes a huge difference.
What’s a “gang input”?
😂 it’s an input to this discussion from a member of the group of people (“gang”) who have experience with old thinkpads. and yes, if your old thinkpad (or other laptop) is overheating and crashing, reapplying the thermal paste is a good next step after cleaning the fans.
I second Debian. It’s what Ubuntu should be, but can’t be, because Debian is already it.
Ubuntu is debian with corporate bs.
But snaps!
Note: I do still use their systray, but that’s it.
I used antix for my laptop. Its the most lightweight. I also used Debian on it. Mine is also lenovo. If you want real lightweight use antix I guess.
Ever given MX a spin on it?
No. I went for antix. Before it ran on manjaro for years. Moved to different distro like last year cause of some hardware issue. Might still go back to it.
I wanted something very light on the laptop. Mx is fine I guess. But I went ahead with antix at the time.
Older Thinkpads are very well supported by pretty much everything, so it might be helpful to know more about your experience and what you’ve liked or not liked, and what you intend to run on it.
Linux Mint or Fedora aren’t bad options, Fedora will require a larger version upgrade at least yearly.
I have a gen 6 x1 carbon which I read is similar. Popos runs a dream on it.
Nixos
NixOS is anything but lightweight…
What do you mean by lightweight ? NixOS can uses every WM, every DE without any issues. It is lightweight because you know all packages you download… A friend of mine uses NixOs with a T440p…
Fedora runs like a champ on em
Yeah, it runs like a charm on my T14s. No that I’ve tried much else.
Would go with Fedora or Opensuse if you want to have something that just works. Try endevouros or Arch if you wanna thinker/play around with your os
I’ve had less “just works” luck with OPENSUSE than with Arch.
I’m a big fan of Debian stable for school / work laptops. Older packages aren’t great, but if you aren’t someone who needs the newest libreoffice version or something, it works fine. Updates will basically never break it apart from major releases (which you have a few years before you have to worry about, although you can upgrade sooner).
