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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

Personally, they've lost my business. I used and loved Thinkpads for many years, but I no longer use them and now recommend against their purchase. Lenovo has a huge trust gap to repair.

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I stick with ThinkPads old enough to have coreboot support. On the up side you get a proper keyboard, a screen aspect ratio not optimized only for consuming video, cheap spare parts and flawless Linux support.

Purism products look every day less of a luxury and more of a need.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-15/

Same thing here, running both Linux and Windows at different times. The old ThinkPads used to be absolutely great machines in every way. These days I'm strictly on macOS and would recommend a MacBook/Pro to almost anyone, but contrary to many Mac users I'm actually not a huge fan of the hardware (apart from the trackpad and MagSafe, which they killed).

If Apple would build a modern laptop in an old school ThinkPad bento box rollcage-protected user repairable/upgradable chassis with a replaceable battery, ECC memory and the new ThinkPad keyboard, I'd be all over that...yeah, I know, but one can dream.

At least keyboard-wise there's the ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard option [1]. Been using it with macOS for about 2 years now, just changed the keyboard modifier settings to make it work like a Mac keyboard (and one could use something like Karabiner/-Elements to map the weirdly placed PrtSc key to Alt/Option). And the Bluetooth version fits nicely over the integrated keyboard when on the go.

I find it compares to other keyboards as the MacBook trackpad compares to other trackpads, that is - it's in a league of its own in terms of feel.

[1] https://support.lenovo.com/en/solutions/pd026745

Edited to add the Bluetooth version.

For your friends and family at least I recommend ElementaryOS. It’s a good introduction to the MacOS design philosophy, it runs fast on older hardware, and grandma can function with it relatively quickly with a bit of coaching.

While I agree that Superfish was a disaster, keep in mind that it did not affect the ThinkPad line at all. From what I heard, the consumer and business lines have strong separation inside Lenovo. I have lost all trust in their consumer division, too. But it seems silly to me to discount ThinkPads based on the malware bundled with Lenovo's consumer offerings.

I would, however, recommend against using Thinkpads as they are simply no longer a quality line. It's sad to see how far they've fallen as they were my goto for many years.

Keep in mind that they only screwed over the consumers because they knew there would be no punishment. They knew that businesses would drop them if they did the same thing to them. They took advantage of people, and would do the same thing to businesses if they knew they could get away with it. Why someone would trust this company at all is beyond me. They tried to screw over your mom and dad, and your family, but that's okay because they aren't a business?

What OS do you run and what machine would you suggest for it instead?

I'm not OP but all of my thinkpads are second hand and run lubuntu.

All of my windows systems run an old copy of win7 and are built from newegg hardware, asus msi etc

I run Arch on a Dell Precision, which works great for me.

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