Makes sense. I was thrown off by the fact that you described it as "a refurb" and assumed you had bought something refurbished.
Side question: you bought a laptop but don't know what specs it has? How did that happen?
I'm not sure that I follow the rationale. If this is your only active machine, what is the issue with having to shut down and boot into an installer to install Linux?
Is your goal to overwrite your existing OS with Linux, or to dual boot?
That's good to know. Thanks!
Yeah, that's fair. It definitely depends on the model and the product tier. All the manufacturers, even Lenovo's lower end/consumer models, can have poor build quality on some models, so I would avoid those. Your average mid-tier and up business laptop will probably hold up just fine, though.
At some level it may also be luck of the draw, even if build quality will help the odds. Sometimes even a high-end laptop can get dropped once at the wrong angle and stop working, and yet I have seen beat-up chromebooks which looked like they came from a warzone and yet somehow still run.
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.
I don't think you need to limit yourself to a Thinkpad specifically. Linux should work on almost any laptop these days. I would look around for secondhand business laptops. They tend to be reasonably priced and often gently used when they are coming from business environments.
I didn't know that. I will have to try that out. Thanks.
[Palpatine voice]: "Do it!"
I'll give a shoutout to the rEFInd boot manager. If anyone has ever had trouble with Grub, rEFInd continues to work for years across multiple machines. I have never had a problem with it.
It is an HP Omnibook 7, model 16T-BH000. Mine is 16", but it also comes in a 14" model called 14T-HG000 with the same 300 series processors if that is your preferred size.
It has an aluminum chassis, and I got mine configured with a 120Hz OLED screen. 70Wh battery on the 16" and 68Wh on the 14", though a 3% difference in battery is probably not enough to be noticeable. The 14" weighs around 1.44kg/3.17 lbs while the 16" weighs 1.96kg/4.32 lbs. I think that is actually a smidge lighter than the Macbooks, but not as light as something like the LG gram or the Asus Expertbook series, though I can't speak for either of those as I have never owned them.
HP runs sales on their website frequently, so while my configuration normally would have cost around $2200 USD, I got it on sale for around $1600.
Edit: though I guess per your criteria above, yes, it does come with Windows installed and I ended up putting in a second SSD and installing Linux on that. Buying my own SSD was cheaper than upgrading to a 2TB option on their website, and it has two NVMe slots, so now I can dual boot as well. Also bear in mind that in a Macbook, the SSD is soldered to the motherboard and non-removable.
I decided to be a bit silly and have it in my rabbit yunomi. This sample I had was quite good. It has a bit of that brothy, rich note that one associates with gyokuro. Shinchas tend to be a bit stronger than normal sencha, and so can often have a bitter edge which I do not prefer. This one was very mellow, though, with very little bitterness.
I apologize for the sub-optimal lighting in a slightly dark corner of my living room.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what this might be? The location is North Carolina, USA. I'm no expert, but looking around at some photos, my best guess might be a grass spider of the genus Agelenopsis. Hopefully this isn't too mundane of a spider for this community.
The size I would estimate is around 15mm or so. Fortunately, they were a very cooperative photography subject and did not move while I went and grabbed a ruler for the last image below.
Ah, okay. Then yes, as others have mentioned, it sounds like you want a portable linux install.
I keep around install USBs of both Arch Linux and Mint, as both boot into a live version of the distro, and I can either open a terminal to debug things, or arch-chroot into my arch install if I broke my bootloader or something.