I just go a slick new work machine: a Lenovo ThinkPad X300. It’s got loads of RAM (4GB), a 60GB solid-state disk in place of a hard drive, and it all weighs in at just under 3 lbs. It’s the best laptop I’ve ever used, and if it’s anything like the other ThinkPads I’ve owned, it should be with me for a while.
The nicest surprise has actually been just how well Ubuntu worked out of the box. Wireless, video, webcam, and both pointing devices worked right off the bat. One well-documented config tweak later, and I had suspend/resume (and fast, too — just about as good as my MBP). Audio took a bit more work, mainly because Ubuntu distributed an older ALSA snapshot. Once I re-compiled the audio drivers from the latest ALSA release and moved the Ubuntu versions aside, I had loud, clear sound.
I do mean loud, too — the built-in speakers on this thing is significatly louder than my MacBook Pro, or any other X-series ThinkPad I’ve tried (X24, X41, X60). Since music + video are a big part of what I do with a laptop, that’s actually really nice to have.
Overall, this is a machine I can highly recommend. The 1.2 GHz processor and integrated graphics chip should feel poky compared to my year-old but faster-on-paper Mac, but the solid-state disk helps quite a bit, and certain key applications (Firefox in particular) just feel faster under Linux than they do on OS X.
Oh man, I’d love to get one of those. Going to have to content myself with a netbook later this year.
Also, if you haven’t already discovered it, you should check out gnome-do — it’s basically Quicksilver for Linux. Don’t bother with the version in the default repos, though, use the repos listed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomeDo/Installation
Thanks for the updated repository pointer — I had been playing with GNOME Do, but the versions in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories were pretty lame. (I.e, invoking gnome-do then typing ‘fire’ didn’t bring up Firefox as an option, which immediately convinced me it was more or less useless.)
In a lot of ways, a Netbook would work just about as well as the ThinkPad, but I’d have a hard time doing much coding on a 9-11″ LCD. The 13″ widescreen on the X300 is okay, especially given that the resolution is as high as my MacBook Pro (1440×900).
Yeah, I had the same experience with gnome do initially, then I saw a post mentioning the PPA repo and it changed everything.
I agree about the netbook vs. thinkpad issue. In my case, it’s doubtful it would be used as a regular coding platform so much as a scratchpad for the occasional quick hack. I need something I can just keep in the bag and pull out when I have a spare 30 minutes to get some quick hacking or noodling around done.
Every time I’ve been ready to pull the trigger on a Netbook, I go double-check eBay and realize that you can get an “obsolete” subnotebook like the X41 for a similar price, and have a much more capable, sturdy machine. Just food for thought.
How’s the keyboard on the X300? I’ve heard that lenovo substantially downgraded the keyboard on some of the newest thinkpads (both the T400 and T500), which gave me a bit of pause.