This upcoming semester is my last semester of college. The last few classes I need were only available in person so I needed a laptop but I wanted to spend as little amount of money as possible. I just needed something to take notes and something to run labs. I had the intention of installing Linux, I wanted something small with at least 8 GB of RAM and I didn’t want to get screwed out of ports. I wasn’t finding anything that fit my criteria. That’s when I had a random thought. “why do Linux guys love ThinkPads so much?” I start googling BOOM, that’s what I needed! I settled on the ThinkPad x240.
- Intel i5 with two cores
- 12.5 inch screen
- 128 gig SSD
- That all-important 8 GB of RAM
- Dirt cheap
Picking my OS
I have a decent amount of Linux experience mainly Debian based distributions inside a virtual machines running on my somewhat beefy computer. So I didn’t know if I needed a super lightweight distro or if it could handle something I was more used to like Ubuntu. So I start spinning up virtual machines and giving it as few resources as I could reasonably give it and seeing how it would run.
I tried Ubuntu lite I took one look at it and thought to myself this looks like something out of 2005 and my eyes hurt haha.
I also tried Manjaro, only because I heard it was very lightweight but I was a little intimidated because I’ve never used anything arch based and I knew there were certain things that came with the rolling release model. I ended up just going with Ubuntu why over complicate things haha. I will post an update when I use it for a couple more weeks but so far so good.