[svlug] a question regarding which laptop for around $1000 that I might install Ubuntu on?

[Lister]

On 08/31/2018 11:31 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ray Steding (raysteding at gmail.com):
>
>> Any suggestions for a $1000 laptop with a 15" screen, Core i7, 250-500
>> SSD, 8-16GB of ram that I might install Ubuntu on.
>>
>> Any recommendations would be helpful and appreciated.
> Practically any laptop that's been in production for at least a year, is
> my general rule of thumb.[1]  To get best bang for the buck by _far_,
> get a used unit.  And honestly, an i5 is more than enough CPU.  Also, if
> an otherwise good laptop has a hard drive rather than an SSD, buy it
> anyway, because reasonable SSDs can now (also) be gotten for cheap.
With the personal experience gleaned so far, I wholeheartedly agree.
>
> The prestige find would be something like a used Lenovo ThinkPad X1
> Carbon of some vintage or other.  Super-light (about 2.5 lb).  Though
> those have 14" screens.
> https://www.ebay.com/bhp/thinkpad-x1
>
> I found a Fujitsu Lifebook T900 used from a guy in San Jose, earlier
> this year, and with 8GB of RAM and no storage in it, for $100.  He added
> a nice little Samsung SSD for $40, so $140 for the whole thing.  It has
> a Core i5-540M, 13.3-inch 1280 x 800 display[2], and dual-digitizer that
> both recognizes pen input and multitouch finger gestures (so, you can
> use it either as a tablet or as a laptop -- pretty slick).  New, eight
> years ago, this would have cost over two grand.  The price curve for
> laptops is about as steep as for cars.
> https://www.slashgear.com/fujitsu-lifebook-t900-multitouch-core-i7-tablet-sneaks-on-sale-0472765/
Old dell precisions (4600, 4700 and 4800) and latitudes (e6330, e6430 
...et al) have served me very well. They are available in e-bay (both 
brand new -- sometime with warranty) or used and refurbished. Please go 
with nvidia/intel for gpus, for some reason I could not get ATIs work 
reliably (2 and 3 high res display setting)

Precisions are heavy, latitudes are not light, but manageable.
In the last 5 years only one dell failed once.  I have one latitude 
booted up and running centos 7.2 for 430 days (yes, with infrequent 
hibernations). Both models work very well with lubuntu/ubuntu mate 
16.04. Not updated to 18.04 yet but I don't expect any surprises

thanks
lister