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[LowTechMagazine] - How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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OP ended up on a Core Duo limited to 3GB of RAM, back in 2017.
I expect today, the sweet spot daily driver for most people would be an X220 or X230.
How do you make a daily driver out of a computer that's weaker than most phones and will struggle even in showing modern websites on a browser?
X220/X230 still has 2/4T cores, up to 16GB of RAM, and both mSATA and SATA ports for SSD upgrades. They also have IPS displays.
It was only five years ago that Intel moved their i5 and i7's from dual cores. Some lower end machines still have these core counts. These are still viable machines.
I think this is as far back as most people would be comfortable with on a daily basis. One could still run modern desktop environments (KDE/Gnome) on these systems and browse the modern web without any tricks (adblock, disabling javascript).
That modern smartphones are more powerful only shows how overkill modern smartphones are, where the profit margins are, and how bloated our mobile operating systems have become. Why do I need more processing power to have less ability to do things on a smartphone?
Regarding the author's (now 18 year old) machine, the author explains their workflow and how using a minimalist distribution for older machines works for them. I wouldn't recommend this to any casual user however, but it also shows how one can make the most of what they already own.
This analysis matches my experiences with both kinds of devices. I am writing this on a T60, which is also from 2006 as the laptop of the author. It is a device I use regularly (I prefer the haptics of it over newer ones, especially when writing), but not as my only daily driver. The main stop gaps are video streaming sites. For those I have an X220, which has no problems at all with "modern" websites". Both run a "minimalist" Linux distribution (Bunsenlabs).
Moving towards newer Thinkpads has the downside that the article already mentions: the design quality of Lenovo's Thinkpads did a sharp downturn between the x220 and 230 series and seems to recover only temporarily. One problem that the users of an X60 or T60 face, is that both are still 32bit systems, which will lead to increasing incompatibility of software. Going for a X61 or T61 can solve that problem.