>>730Wanted to add; The T and P-series are the ones you'll probably want to be looking at for anything kind of modern in the thinkpad line. P-series are basically T-series that are meant to be a desktop replacement. So you're typically trading worse battery life in exchange for slightly better performance. But since we're talking about laptops it's hard to take advantage of that extra speed due to throttling most of the time. Especially in these newer models that have gone all-in on the thin-copy-Macbook thing everyone is doing now.
Mine is pretty good about compiling software without throttling. It's better than my 12 year old aging desktop in that respect. But only because it has double the RAM and CPU cores. It has a hard time maintaining the CPU at full speed without getting hot and throttling down to save itself. You'll also want to make sure you have your profiles setup correctly so it doesn't murder your battery when off the A/C charger. By default a lot of distros don't set that stuff up correctly out of the box.
Avoid the L-series. The hardware may look tempting as a cheaper T-series but in reality the screen will always be worse and you're going to sacrifice built quality. I haven't handled an L14 in person but I hear the build quality and screens are pretty bad compared to the T14's.
You'll also want to avoid the "s" versions. By that I mean; T14 Gen 1 AMD and T14s Gen 1 AMD are not the same machine. The "s" versions are even thinner and do away with features to obtain that thinner profile. So you lose out on the ability to have add-on sticks of RAM or an ethernet port where you could have been able to get one otherwise for probably a cheaper price point.
You want the ethernet port. I know you're probably thinking
>it's a laptop! Why do I need one!?but trust me you want it. It's much easier to debug problems when you can simply plug into the LAN and go from there and not have to screw around with getting WiFi working. On mine Wifi hasn't been a problem. Ironically, the Gen 1 AMDs come with an Intel WiFi chip with great support. Where the Gen 1 Intels come with some other WiFi chip with bad support. But this isn't always the case and it's kind of luck of the draw with these on the used market. You don't know exactly what you're getting until you get it in your hands and probe it to see w
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