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Comment by lawgimenez | Hacker News Reader

I just bought a second hand T480 last week and installed Fedora in it. I'm loving it but the resolution 1336x768 is underwhelming.

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I ended up going with a second hand T580 last year myself. It was a hard choice between the T480 or the T580, but I've been extremely happy with my decision. It's now maxed out with 64GB ram, and a second SSD in the WWAN slot. I'm running Debian Sid with ZFS root on it.

Cool, I chose a brand-new T580 from the factory in 2018. I had nowhere near the resource demands that you have, so I am happy to be chugging along with the i5, 128GB SSD, 16GiB RAM. Two upgrades I probably didn't even need are a touchscreen and a medium-size second battery, but otherwise, it's perfect.

Initially I put CentOS on it, which was really broken, so I swapped in Fedora which worked great. The T580 is RHEL-certified (other models are Ubuntu-certified, so it's interesting you chose Debian for yours.) Eventually I reverted to Windows 10 and upgraded to Pro.

It's now my only home computer and daily driver, for work and personal both, for the time being.

The RAM was a lucky find. Amazon warehouse had an open box 64GB kit for $180ish, which the price of a new 32GB kit at the time iirc. I figured I'd take a chance on it, and ran memtest on it for 32 hours or so and it checked out. I tend to run a lot of VM's and docker containers to minimize the need to VPN and use the corporate test/dev environment.

Mine has the i7 and the touch screen, I ended up I talking the seller down to $800 BIN on eBay and at the time it still had a year left on the warranty.

All in all, RAM and extra HDD I'm only in it for $1200 which I think was great deal for the last Lenovo Thinkpad that doesn't have soldiered RAM.

You can get a much brighter 1080p panel for it for not a lot of money. Do a search on reddit for T480 display upgrades.

The install itself is pretty easy, and it is so much better than the shitty 768 panels that most of these secondhand 480s came with.

Edit: typo

Wow I didn't know this, thanks!

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