this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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Sure but other brands tend to have a lot of issues in general and the Linux support is worse, whereas a T480 was like $200 last I checked and has a huge Linux community behind it and supposedly they last a long time
Sure, there is certainly nothing wrong with a T480, and if you can find them at a reasonable price then go for it. That said, I would not exclude any other brands out of hand if you can find a good deal on, say, a 3-5 year old business laptop from the likes of Dell or HP. For all the durability of a T480, bear in mind that it will already be ~8 years old when you get it.
I think historically Linux users had to be a bit more particular about laptop models due to spotty driver support on laptop hardware, hence the love for Thinkpads which had good Linux compatibility, but these days I think the only real compatibility concerns are around fingerprint sensors with proprietary drivers and the occasional oddball wifi chip.
Upgrading BIOS is also a concern as @PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world mentioned, but in some cases I have used a bootable Windows USB drive to run the .exe-based FW upgrades on my HP laptop, for example.
You can just extract the bios.files now. As long as you have a flash drive you can update the bios on HP.laptops.
That's good to know. Thanks!