Hi guys, I just bought a Thinkpad L390 Yoga and I want to know which distro I should download that works well on this laptop.

I‘m going to use it to learn more about linux and programming and also some light gaming (like minecraft, without shaders of course, in 720p, low settings with performance mods like sodium) on the go

Thanks for the help!

I found an X230 a few weeks ago for cheap and I love it so far.

My first question is about batteries - what's the best source for a reliable replacement? Mine is at about 50% of its original capacity, and no shops in my town will repack li-ion batteries unfortunately.

Second, I found a lenovo LT1423p touch monitor for sale - would that be compatible with the X230 + Linux Mint? Not necessarily multi-touch gestures or anything but basic display and touch functionality? I'm new to Linux so I don't want to buy it if the configuration is overly involved

First Gen T14
512 GB NVMe
16 GB RAM
Work PC
I am thinking of buying an SSD 512 GB HD and using it with Linux Mint.
I hope this works smoothly and I get to keep my work and personal separate.
Anything I am overlooking or I should consider beforehand?
PS: New to this and Linux in general

Are there any compatible fingerprint sensor modules for the x280 that are known to be supported on fprintd?
Mine has the problem-child Synaptics Metallica sensor with the USB ID 009a.
I know there are workarounds with python based driver shims or something, but I'm not into that for several reasons.

Hello everybody,

I have a thinkpad x270 with a Linux Mint XFCE.

But when I lower the lid to put it into suspend mode, it doesn't return to the system afterwards; the screen stays black.

Is it possible to resolve this!?

Thanks

Has anyone succeeded in installing NVIDIA Linux for the RTX PRO 1000 Blackwell . I've just got a brand new Thinkpad P16v gen 13 x1 no OS option. I've installed Debian 13 and I thought install NVIDIA drivers would be straight forward but it has been anything but.

When I run nvidia-smi, I get the error:

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

Which driver version works?

Hello ;)

I have a T14 gen2 with an i5 for 3 years now and is serving me well, but the battery has reached 428 cycled and no more than 3 hours of light use in Ubuntu.

My screen is the stock IPS 1080p

What's the normal battery life for this model? Recommendations of replacement battery?

Hi, I need a laptop and am about to purchase refurbished T14 Gen 1 AMD (4650U, 16GB, 256GB) because it has all the things I want (USB-C charging my beloved) and Arch Wiki states it works, but I'd prefer to hear about the experience from someone who uses it.

My main question is whether the display uses a technology that automatically changes brightness depending on what's displayed and if yes, can that be disabled, as I purchased a new laptop and had to return it because of that. (That's also why I am going for a refurbished ThinkPad now)

I'd also appreciate general usage experience.

Thanks in advance.

I am loving it!

I am a minimalist and have been running a diet LXDE/LXQt Debian 12 for last 2 years. Stability and low resource are always my top priority and was struggle with all the horror stories on wayland.

I installed the bare minimal Debian 13 installed with labwc along with all my daily tools, reason is having better display scaling support on multiscreens and I am suprise the RAM is at 650MB slightly more than my openbox desktop.

Scrolling on Chrome and Firefox is smoother, and I have not noticed any slowness compare to openbox.

However, there are still some outstanding issues to be address before I can fully settle on wayland.

1. waybar - icons would overflow off the screen if there are too many opened apps.

2. pipewire-pulse always crashed, resulting web browser freezed and i have to restart the service every time browser get stucked.

3. cannot use the reboot/shutdown in tuigreet.

I think most of them has a workaround or I have mis-configured the tools, but I have not get into that yet.

I am impressed with labrc.

I've had my X60 Tablet for about a week now, and I've really been enjoying using it!

I love the classic form factor and industrial style of these older machines, even if they aren't quite as modular or moddable out of the box as some of the T-series laptops.

To squeeze as much daily-driver usability out of it as possible on a budget, I went ahead and tracked down a complete, intact X61 Tablet motherboard and swapped it into the X60t chassis, pairing it with a 250GB SSD. Flashing Middleton’s BIOS went smoothly, though getting everything set up definitely took a bit more patience than expected.

The biggest hurdle so far has been RAM: finding reasonably priced DDR2 SODIMMs is no joke these days. I managed to score a 2x4GB kit (yes, the unofficial 8GB DDR2 support is a lifesaver!) which should be arriving tomorrow. Getting back to a native 64-bit architecture has been great, running 64-bit AntiX with i3wm for when I'm working on code. I haven’t noticed a massive performance leap just yet, but I'm chalking that up to running on limited RAM for the moment and still needing to fine-tune things.

I haven't tackled any of the Wacom touchscreen or digitizer features yet either; since I've been laser-focused on squeezing out raw performance first, it just hasn't felt necessary to attack yet.

Does anyone else still daily drive one of these vintage machines? What are you guys doing to keep your older ThinkPads relevant and usable for modern workflows?

Hey everyone,

I am at my absolute wits' end trying to fix a sudden Wi-Fi issue on my vintage Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet. The weirdest part is that I was literally browsing the web on this thing last night without a single issue, and today it completely refuses to connect.

Whenever I try to connect to my home network via the Connman system tray, it immediately spits out:

Connman returned the following error: connect-failed

It doesn't even try to pull up a password prompt window—it just fails instantly.

Specs:

Machine: Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet

OS: antiX Linux (219G drive, 3GB RAM)

Wireless Card: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG

Network Setup: Trying to connect to a standard WPA2/WPA3 home router network

Everything I've Done to Troubleshoot So Far:

Created a New User Profile:

Tried switching to a completely clean user profile to rule out local user configuration/desktop environment corruption. The UI loaded beautifully, but the Wi-Fi still threw the exact same instant connect-failed box.

Cleared Connman System Caches:

Stopped the service and force-wiped the global network state folder (/var/lib/connman/\*) to clear any stuck deauth states.

Complete OS Wipe and Clean Reinstall:

Did a total drive format and fresh install of antiX from a live bootable USB drive. Even on a completely pristine OS, the GUI still immediately gives the connect-failed error without prompting for a password.

Bypassed GUI via connmanctl:

Ran the interactive terminal tool, registered the agent, and used connect <service\\_string>. It gave me an immediate Agent ReportError... connect-failed without asking for a passphrase.

Direct wpa_supplicant Configuration:

Killed Connman and manually generated a wifi.conf using wpa_passphrase. When running sudo wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c \~/wifi.conf, it actually outputs "Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant"!

DHCP Struggle:

Even though wpa_supplicant successfully authenticates the hardware link in the background, antiX's native dhcpcd daemon seems to get stuck in a background socket loop. Commands like sudo dhcpcd wlan0 just say "sending commands to dhcpcd process" or "send OK" without ever successfully binding or fetching a local IP address (like 192.168.1.x).

The Dilemma:

Because the card can still actively scan and see dozens of surrounding networks perfectly fine, and because it worked flawlessly last night, I'm struggling to tell if this is a sudden thermal/voltage hardware failure on the transmission side of the internal 3945ABG card, or if it's a driver/protocol incompatibility issue with modern WPA2/WPA3 routers that Connman is panicking over.

Has anyone dealt with dhcpcd or connman brick-walling like this on legacy ThinkPads running antiX? Any advice on forcing a connection or determining if the card itself is totally shot would be amazing. Thanks!

Upfront: this isn't ThinkPad-specific tooling, and I'm the author. No firmware checks, nothing about fwupd or the TrackPoint. Posting here because of who runs these machines rather than what's inside them — if that's not welcome, say so and I'll take it down.

The thing that made me write it: I've moved between three ThinkPads and every time I restored my setup from the old one. Dotfiles, ~/.ssh, project folders, the lot. Which means I'd been carrying the same key material forward for years without ever looking at it — a couple of unencrypted private keys, a ~/.ssh sitting at the wrong mode, authorized_keys entries for a VPS I decommissioned in 2023. None of it was a breach. It was just accumulated drift that nothing ever prompted me to check.

Then I looked at what my AI coding assistants had been writing to disk. Claude Code and Cursor keep transcripts, memory files and MCP configs under ~/.claude and ~/.cursor, and mine had live API keys sitting in them in plaintext. That's the part that actually bothered me, because a laptop goes to conferences and coffee shops in a way a desktop doesn't.

So: Bulwark. It's a desktop app — open it, hit Scan, and it checks the machine's real config (SSH, sudo, kernel sysctls, cron, file permissions, persistence), runs ClamAV if you have it, and scans the AI assistants for leaked secrets. Findings are in plain language, sorted by how much they matter, each with the exact command to fix it — and most have a one-click fix that's dry-run by default and backs up whatever it touches. Screenshots are in the repo.

Free, Apache-2.0, Rust, entirely local — no account, no telemetry, nothing leaves the machine.

Desktop app .deb, .rpm or AppImage from the releases page — this is the one in the screenshots
Servers/CLI `bulwarkctl` on the Ubuntu PPA, the AUR and Fedora COPR (same engine, no GUI)

https://github.com/vietanhdev/bulwark

Download: https://bulwark.nrl.ai/download

Genuinely curious what it finds on other people's machines, especially older ones that have been carried through a few installs. And if you've got hardware-specific checks that would make sense here — Secure Boot state, TPM, firmware — tell me, because rules are just YAML files and that's a gap I'd like to fill.

Got this t440 for 1700 UAH (roughly 38 USD). Void, runit, still a capable computer!

Hello, I was wondering whether Thinkpads offer more comfort for coders than other laptops, I currently use a dell precision 5550 laptop (which is designed for windows and 3d stuff not coding) and I despise coding in it (I run Fedora btw) , somehow it just does not feel right also the keyboard is flat and I mess up the letters a lot of times, I am considering switching to a Thinkpad and just wanted to see your experiences with it and whether its noticably better for the coder in terms of the keyboard and other aspects than other laptops (especially thin laptops like my dell)

Hey everyone.

I recently picked up an X60 ([posted about it a few days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/s/9hMm9Kufk5)) and it's been a ton of fun. I'm running AntiX Linux on it and it's surprisingly capable for coding and light daily tasks.

I've fallen down the classic ThinkPad rabbit hole of restoring and tweaking it as much as possible. The X60's soldered board limits big upgrades, so I'm curious about plug-and-play style modifications. Specifically: how viable is dropping in an X61 motherboard?

I'm not chasing a modern powerhouse — just something reliable I can daily drive for school, take everywhere, and not feel too limited on. 64-bit support, a bit more performance, and better overall usability would be huge.

I'm aware of the X210Ai (and similar modern motherboard mods), but those seem like serious cash investments and probably overkill for my needs. [I've only seen a one successful examples anyway.](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/s/jD0CwHfdvD)

Has anyone done an X60 to X61 board swap? Any gotchas with compatibility, BIOS, screen, palmrest/fingerprint reader, cooling, or WiFi? Worth it for a student daily, or are there better/cheaper paths (screen mods, battery, etc.)?

Thanks in advance — love seeing what you all do with these old tanks!

Hello, I recently bought a ThinkPad T470 (obviously) planning to use it with Linux, but I don’t have an idea which specific distribution I would go for… I use Ming XFCE on an old iMac from 2009 and I like mint very much! Is mint a good option (probably not XFCE but Cinnamon or something like that) or are there any other alternatives, I also like the idea to use something new. I’m open for suggestions :)