[valianteffort]

I bought a refurb gen 4 thinkpad on amazon for like $350 and it arrived almost brand new.

Installed arch, setup some commands to underclock the processor on login and easily boost it when I'm compiling.

Battery life is great but I'm not running a GUI either. Good machine for when I want to avoid distractions and just code.

[blks]

My personal beef with Thinkpads is the screen. Most of the thinkpads I’ve encountered in my life (usually pretty expensive corporate ones) had shitty FHD screens. I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.

[baobun]

FWIW if you buy new from Lenovo, getting a more high-res display has been an option for years.

I'm on the other side where I've been buying Thinkpads partly because of the display. Thinkpads have for a long time been one of the few laptop options on the market where you could get a decent matte non-glare display. I value that, battery life and performance above moar pixels. Sure I want just one step above FHD so I can remote 1080p VMs and view vids in less than fullscreen at native resolution but 4K on a 14" is absolute overkill.

I think most legit motivations for wanting very high-res screens (e.g. photo and video editing, publishing, graphics design) also come with wanting or needing better quality and colors etc too, which makes very-highly-scaled mid-range monitors a pretty niche market.

> I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.

Did you make a serious effort while having an extended break from retina screens? I'd think you would get used to it pretty quickly if you allow yourself to readjust. Many people do multi-DPI setups without issues - a 720p and a 4k side-by-side for example. It just takes acclimatizing.

[skydhash]

I have a 14” FHD panel (158 dpi) on an old (7 year) laptop and there’s more issues with low resolution icons and paddings than with font rendering. I wouldn’t mind more, but it’s not blurry.

[cromka]

I just learned on Reddit the other day that people replace those screens with third party panels, bought from AliExpress for peanuts. They use panelook.com to find a compatible one.

[ekianjo]

If you buy a X1 from Lenovo the screen is definitely going to be better. if not, you can simply change the screen from most of the other models.

[dllu]

Old Thinkpads are great! I used to have a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6 with Intel Core i7 8640U, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD. I installed Arch Linux on it with Sway.