You'll feel right at home with something from Frame.work (writing this comment from my 13" FW).

If they ever sell their 12" version with AMD cpu, I might get one as well.

Encouraged my friend to buy one, his feedback: "best piece of tech in my past few years."

When I was shopping for that same CPU a couple of years ago for my T530, the cheapest way I found to get one to my door was to buy it already-installed in the bottom-half of a whole 'nother T530 -- with the nVidia upgrade (which I already had).

I thought it was pretty amusing to get the CPU and a complete pile of spare guts for less than the price of the CPU by itself.

Never managed to get one myself, but Framework laptops could be your thing as well?

Hah I'm doing this with some models of that same era judging by the CPU you cited. I had frankensteined one laptop from like the best parts out of three I had from that era, got xubuntu on it, running fine-ish but the Wi-Fi antenna ran through the on-board display chassis, which was destroyed. Took off the top clamshell, was gonna put ether in it and use as a desktop, but oops! The clip holding ethernet cable fell out during disassembly! No prob, pop it back open, oops! One of the screws holding the mobo is stripped! (Also, wife goes into labor while everything disassembled) No sweat, get something from ace to extract. I think I ended up throwing it back together and not testing?

Forgot about it for a couple years, wanted to put opnsense on it and see if I could replace stock equipment leased from ISP, nope. No display.

Fun to a point but probably should just spring for a used thinclient at this point, but prices are scary and I hate letting all this hw go to waste

and now it's 300 :')

T60 user here - just upgraded the CPU to a T7400 C2D, added an SSD and increased the RAM to 4Gb (3.25 or so usable thanks to Libreboot). It's actually still quite usable. I'm currently running Exe GNU/Linux for a modern yet retro look (Trinity DE), and the 4:3 screen and decent keyboard really make it.

I regularly use a significantly older T42. It has a honest-to-gawd parallel port, runs XP nicely and controls a couple of instruments and device programmers. I upgraded the screen at some point (SXGA?) and put a solid-state disk in it. Still going strong.

More of us than you think (and often by preference rather than cost).

Current main travel laptop is a T420, backed by a T520 w/nvidia when needed (older T41s, T60's lying around). Both work fine with linux & modern browsers (the T420 is particular has great battery life).

T430s as a mobile linux workstation for garage projects. For anything else, 14” M series macbook.

Thought I’d put Asahi Linux on it but the workflow I’ve settled on is to use my Mac as a thin client for a linux box under my desk. Best of both worlds.

I still have my T430, but I use my X270 more often now.

[update, 12 hours later: Yep. I seem to be the only one still using a T530.]

I only very recently upgraded from an X230 with X220 keyboard

It was a close call between a totally new machine and a display mod though

It's still great advice :)

X220 was so good for this. Almost like having a FDD

What is your use case? Do you have multiple SSDs with different OSes?

I used to have that similar T470 laptop 5 years ago and it worked really nice. Given that it was company owned, it came out with Windows 10 enterprise, but never felt it underperforming.

It's hard to come by that gnome is slower than windows 10

You should try NetBSD. I know people run NetBSD on T480s so the T470 should work fine. NetBSD on that system will seem very zippy, plus you will learn some new things :)

FWIW, posted via NetBSD 11.0 on a T430 w/16G memory and a 2T HDD.

Hey, stop it! If they do that I won't be able to buy basically new machines for £200 any more!

Get a whole "for parts" model off ebay. The knockoff keyboards suck.

I think Lenovo has a parts depot website. I was able to get parts (LTE modem kit) for an 8 year old model there.

Yeah I know... ZBook Ultra G1a is the only "notebook" alternative while the z13 i more like a "Pad" with keyboard - and while the zbook seems to be a good notebook in general, it is not > 14.5". Otherwise I would have bought it right away.

To be real I already had my mousepointer over the "order" button, when it was 3099 with Ryzen 395+ and 64GB RAM, but I didn't do it and 3 days later it was 3299 - regrets ;)

Another option as buy a used T14s with Ryzen 7840, 32GB and 2k Oled for 699 - but it was too far to check it out and pay it in cash, so I skipped... regrets²

That's my current setup. Only 2 pcie lanes on the nvme though. CPU is feeling a bit long in the tooth for some compiling tasks.

The current t14 with the 16:10 screen and improvements to repairability look good. I'm trying to patiently wait for them to start hitting the used market, but I also recently snapped off one of the two usbc ports on the 480.

Yeah the T14(s) would be the right choice in nearly all of my requirements - even Gen 4 has Ryzen 7840 + OLED + 32GB configs (rarely, but available).

Unfortunately T14 is NOT > 14.5" Display... I would prefer a 15-16" Display (I'm getting old and my eyes are not as good any more), but all of these have a numpad, except the Thinkpad P1 which is only available with Intel and pretty expensive. So the only Ryzen > 14.5" Display option without numpad might be the Framework 16 or maybe some other non business or niche brand.