>>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 what's exactly inside. They are offered in a bunch of different configurations hardware wise and each company buying in bulk bought slightly different config.
They are never worth buying brand new. Wait 3-4 years and pick one up cheap on the used market. You shouldn't pay more than $300. $400 tops for a Thinkpad. Even that I'd argue is too much for most of them.
The T14 I have actually has two ethernet ports. But one of them requires using some kind of dongle through the usb3 port to access it. I think the later models might have that kind of setup. In mine there is a dedicated NIC for the actual ethernet port then the other one that can only be accessed through the dongle. Obviously, not using a dongle is preferred.
A lot of them have the ability to hook up to a dock with such dongles built in. But I've heard support can be hit-or-miss with those outside of Windows. Later models are going more and more Windows-only. With the parent company ignoring Linux users. Even my 4-5 year old laptop has a ton of long standing issues in Linux related to battery life, dock and some other misc. issues in not-Windows world. This is a big change from the older laptops where Linux (well Ubuntu) was considered first class citizen and the parent company would regularly roll out BIOS updates and firmware fixes when issues were reported. The older the thinkpad the less issues you should expect of this nature.
Last but not least: Older thinkpads have a much better built quality compared to modern ones. Another long post I'm not going to make right now. Just be aware that the older the machine the better the build quality you should expect.
You need to balance out your needs and pick one that'll work best for you. Do you need 12+ hours battery life, a solid chassis built out of metal and can live with 15+ year old CPU? Something you'll just do mild text editing on and such? Then go for the older ones for sure. You can't get such things (excluding CPU) in a more modern thinkpad. If you need a lot of RAM and CPU cores you'll have to sacrifice some build quality and live with the more plastic-y chassis. It's still a solid machine. Much better than 99% of machines on the market under $1.5k. But it isn't as touch as the older ones.
Whatever you do don't fall for these scam artists selling old hardware with "linux out of the box" for $2k+ right now. You'll see a lot of people claiming those are great laptops. But they're mostly the same crappy hardware, same crappy Ubuntu/Debian+GNOME linux distro pre-installed with horrible customer support.
Really, the state of modern laptops is pretty grim. There is no reason why a 15-25 year old Thinkpad shouldn't last you a life time. The only reason they don't boils down to the same problem with all computers now: The need to use the web browser and interact with modern "platforms" if you want to do anything but mess around in Vi and Emacs.
So again rule of thumb: Don't buy anything newer than the T14 Gen 1 AMDs. Don't buy anything with Nividia mobile graphics (avoid the hybrid Intel+Nividia stuff like the plague). If you get Intel CPU make sure it's paired with Intel GPU and ONLY intel GPU. Avoid all "little s" thinbook models. Try to avoid buying one with a lower end screen (or plan to upgrade it right off with a cheap replacement from China). Try to get one with external battery that's easy to replace (and buy good replacements not the cheapest you can find from China). Try to get one with ethernet port that doesn't require dongle. Try to get one with the ability to replace keyboard/trackpad (you'll need to do it at some point over the course of the lifetime of the machine if you use it daily. Maybe a good idea to buy replacement parts now while they're still easy to come by). Try to buy one with the ability to upgrade the RAM (or plan to buy that with the machine if it doesn't already come with it). If you get one with soldered RAM make sure that's maxed out when you buy it (so you can really max it out when you do add in a stick and it'll run full speed). Try to get one with as much storage as you need (or plan to update it). Do your research about white/blacklisted SSD/NVMEs (later models are bad about this or require certain parts due to other reasons).
It seems like a maze to navigate but most of this stuff is well researched and there exist wikis to walk you through the pros/cons of each. Whatever you do. Don't overpay. There are tons of re-sellers on ebay selling these things cheap. Don't get tricked into paying a lot for a "maxed out" model that's really just $50 worth of parts and a machine they got for $100 that they're selling for $300+ due to so many suckers wanting one because they saw someone on youtube shilling them.
Sorry this got long. I hope it was helpful.
By the way if you care yes the touchscreen on the T14 I have just werks. No idea why anyone would want to use it and get finger prints all over their screen. But it works out of the box with everything I've tried it with.
