Hi,
A problem I have been coming up against is that a lot of the newer, budget Windows laptop (which I will immediately replace with my distribution of choice upon receipt) have memory soldered on the motherboard. This is a decision which brings the utmost distate to my mouth; I’m looking for budget laptops around the $300 mark (new) that let me upgrade their parts. Which models should I be looking at?
I am aware that the used market is fairly decent right now but I’d like to take a look at what’s coming up alongside looking at used gear. Thanks.
$300 is a really difficult price point for what youre asking for new. At the price, youre in the chromebook range, where even the windows machines are going to be as barebones as possible.
You want to step into the used market if you want customizable for $300. Getting something good thats a few years old like an lenovo carbon x1 looks possible, and they are a dream to update. The above supports linux with no issues.
I see. There’s not much of a choice outside the used thinkpad range then. Very well. Thank you
Honestly, the value proposition of old business computers is almost unbeatable.
Yes, it’s not the most recent hardware, but decent enough, especially the chonky boi ThinkPads are very easy to repair/upgrade and built like tanks (though only Russian ones, they barely withstand an RPG hit, which is a shame).
Could you suggest a few models? I’d be fairly interested in older business laptops especially if they are a viable alternative to the thinkpad line (never a bad idea to have more choices!)
The thinkpad t480 for more modern feeling. A t470 for some more upgradeability. I also like the x270 for a smaller 12.5 inch screen and I think you can find all of these under 300.
Dell Precision, HP Probook for example. There are probably more, but these are the ones that I know of.
Yes. This is the way.
Cheap Chromebooks tend to break just like other cheap laptops. The only difference is that the OS may feel more responsive initially.
Framework announced their B-stock systems for $500. That’s going to be your best bet for relatively new, upgradable, and kind close to $300.
Otherwise, gonna have to go used, and good luck with upgradability since everyone’s been soldering everything on for a decade.
Came here to make sure this was represented. $500 is a great price for a fully upgradable laptop.
Plus the cost of your own ram, storage, etc.
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Thinkpads will get you what you want. A T480 can be found at around that price and is basically fully upgradable and Linux compatible
Yes this, everything new at that pricepoint is complete garbage, ewaste straight out the factory.
The T480, while getting a little bit up there in age now, is still very capable having a quad core CPU, if you get both the internal and largest external battery it will rival M1 macbooks in battery life, two ram slots.
Thanks, and yes I’m looking at the used Thinkpad market. I was just curious if I could purchase anything of the sort new in my budget
new budget computers are horrible. don’t get them. they’re old designs sloppily put into tacky new looking chassis for a higher price.
hell there’s probably a $300 budget laptop that’s slower than my fucking <$100 11yo thinkpad t430
This is what I have and I was in your situation, op.
Upgradeable parts = non-soldered RAM and SSD?
Partly
Do you need a laptop?
A mini PC may be a better bet - $300 on a mini PC will get you more hardware than a laptop at the same price as you’re not paying for the screen or chassy but you’d then need to supply a screen (TV would do), keyboard and mouse.
If you need the mobility then it’s a no go, but if you’re more looking for a device at home a PC is better value.
If you do need the mobility of a laptop, then you won’t get anything much new for $300 as others have said. You’d either need to increase your budget or look at second hand as others have said.
Chassis
May I recommend further a good desktop pc w/upgradable parts and a used thinkpad laptop for travelling? You can get a good thinkpad for work and small games for $20-50 and they tend to last forever and be easy to repair. my favorite is X series
Most laptops won’t allow you to update parts, especially at that price. I think you’re better off getting a cheap laptop that has good reviews and you verify that Linux works in it. Personally, I’ve converted a few chromebooks to linux (making sure first that the CoreBoot BIOS/firmware works on these laptops).
You will struggle to find anything decent at that price new.
Plenty of good used options though, a used ThinkPad will have great Linux compatibility and be serviceable. They can be very cheap depending on how older hardware you can tolerate. There are other business grade laptops from Dell, HP etc that have good refurb deals too.
I’m starting to realise that myself. It might just be a better idea to go used after all. Thanks
ThinkPad 470 is not mentioned? Was it a bad choiseI? I want fedora om it?
There’s nothing wrong with the T470, it’s just an older model. If you find a really good deal on one then get it. If not, then go for the T480 since it has a newer CPU and better battery life.
I think Ive got a great deal, it works fine now, hope it still will do woth fedora 39
It will probably be fine for the next decade at least. It supports up to 32GB of RAM.
I was simply asking for newer laptops. I am considering the used thinkpads alongside any recommendations here so I feel more informed
Business Dells are also worth considering. They’re comparable to the Thinkpad.
Get a used Thinkpad. Shop around eBay for a T480 or T490 which should be at that price range. Solid machines with great Linux compatibility. Anything new will be much worse at that price point. If you desperately searching for something new maybe a HP 255 G9 with a Rzyen 3 would be fitting. Not as good built quality wise and I’m not sure about Linux compatibility but at least it is upgradable. (https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c08017466)
Thanks, yes, I’m looking at the T480 as an option. I was just curious about what I could find new in this range that fits my needs, and so far it seems like there isn’t such a product.
The last thing you should be worrying about when buying a budget laptop is the expandability of the ram. it seriously doesn’t matter if you only have 4gb, Linux is so lightweight it runs completely fine.
imo you should be worrying about:
- display quality (even some ips displays look horrible)
- build quality (physically feel the keyboard, chassis flex, etc)
- battery life (for heavily used laptops account for the price of a replacement. for old thinkpads you can extend it dramatically with bigger bstteries)
- cpu speed (core count, single core performance, hyperthreading, etc. new celerons lose to i5s from 2013 lmao)
- storage (MAKE SURE IT’S NOT EMMC!!)
I would say 8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum you should consider buying for desktop Linux now. With 4GB, you need a lightweight distro if you want enough RAM left to run a web browser without swapping.
And don’t forget that someone running Linux might need to have a Windows VM for some situations. So you need to have at least 8Gb of RAM to be able to allocate 4Gb to this Virtual Machine.
Otherwise if you just use Linux 4 might be enough but really limiting.
I agree that it’s limiting, but I’d argue that the other things I mentioned are more limiting.
my point isn’t that 4gb of ram is fine, it’s that the other things i mentioned are worse.
Yeah I agree that a nice SSD, a good display, etc are also really important.
For me, my Surface Go 1 with a 128Gb SSD is the minimum in 2024.
I bought it in 2019 and I can clearly see myself using it for at least 5 more years if Linux doesn’t become way more resource hungry.
Yup, KDE is out of the question with 4gb
i run kde6 with 4gb though
The last time I tried kde5 it was a horrible experience. It ran but was super laggy. Maybe kde6 improved ram usage?
really? my kde laptop manages fine with 4gb with a few heavy ff tabs open
4 GB RAM is not enough if you plan on using multiple tabs on a browser. And I don’t mean a ridiculous number of tabs. You might run out from 4 tabs or so.
Thanks for the comment, but my workflow will require some RAM. I’ll look towards the older thinkpads, thanks!
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Thinkpad.
A 30 series would do. I heard the series afterward are going downhill, except for W541 and T480.
I myself am rocking an X230 and W530.
i love my t430 <3
i’ve heard the t440p isn’t that bad though, if you replace the trackpad with the one from the t450
Ooh, you might be right! The biggest complaint on the 40 series seems to be that touchpad. The T440p seems like a solid machine. I’ve heard T440 and X240 are utter trash.
Thank you, I’ll keep those models in mind along with the slightly newer T480 model
I can recommend minifree.org - this is a shop from Leah Rowe, who is the lead developer of the libreboot project. That is a (more secure) bios alternative, related to coreboot.
I bought my Thinkpad T400 from there, some 6 years ago or something. I am still writing on it and i can highly recommend it. However, today i would buy a smaller form factor. so 12,8° instead of 14°.
So it is kind of heavy compared to a macbook air and not the fastest machine, but you can get your stuff done. And it is really really durable, which is the reason i bought one of the older thinkpads.
Around $300, there would be the libreboot 820: https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-820/
And with minifree.org you can be sure that the linux/libreboot/coreboot support is really great. Because: since Leah is a developer, she testes everything beforehand and fixes problems when she notices it. So i would recommend to describe what you would want to do. For instance, initially i wanted to use a encrypted harddrive and i had installed the grub variant, but later upgraded to libreoot with seabios. This was much better and fixed the problems with my encrypted harddrive. But i suspect leah would have found out and fixed that already, had i told her that.
Also for instance, seabios has better openBSD support.
You’re going to have to up your budget a bit. However, you can get a Thinkbook, which is exactly what you’re looking for - DIMM slot, upgradable NVME and USB-C charging. Only downside is that it comes with a fake (non-Zen4) 7th gen Ryzen processor. If you can wait for some time, the next 2024 ThinkPad E series may have DIMM slots without the soldered RAM nonsense.
I am looking at used Thinkpads, thanks. It seems that’s my best choice after all.
