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?

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’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 am a little confused by the reasoning here. Is battery life your only consideration at all? Are there any other criteria which influence your choice?

It seems like a shame to jump ship on an entire ecosystem solely because your current machine has disappointing battery life.

I recently got a machine with the new Intel 358H and the B390 iGPU. I haven’t used it a ton yet, but it seems like it gets around 8-10 hours battery life on normal web browsing/productivity tasks in my experience, and while not as powerful as an RTX 4060 (Most benchmarks place the B390 somewhere between a 3050 and 4050), I imagine would be serviceable for editing and coding.

KDE. I don’t even do much to customize it. I think it looks pretty good out of the box.

I think you would need to provide more detail to know what you have. Does it have a model number on it anywhere?