Celejar wrote: > I'm curious - everyone has always seemed to love ThinkPads, but I've > never understood what exactly makes them so popular. I'm not > disagreeing or challenging - I've never used one, and I just want to > understand why everyone swears by them. The IBM ThinkPads were always solid equipment and all of the hardware was supported very well. They did what you expected a laptop to do in that all of the peripherals worked with Linux drivers. Networking worked with native drivers. Graphics display worked with native drivers. Suspend to ram works. Suspend to disk works. The volume buttons work. The keyboard light can be toggled on and off. The special function keys work. Battery life is reasonable. The keyboard is the best of any of the laptops I have used. In my experience everything "just works". Contrast that experience to other brands of laptops I have used where only 80% of the peripherals had working Linux drivers. With one I had endless trouble with the graphics chip and eventually traded the machine out. With one I could only get suspend to work by using the kernel patches for suspend2 (now known as tux-on-ice). Excellent as those were it meant I always required a custom patched kernel. But I also required a custom kernel for the wifi driver on that machine. So I couldn't just install security upgrades for kernels but always had to spend the time to build patched new ones. Another machine I could never get all of the special function keys running. There seems to alway be pieces that never function with Linux. Vendors put on proprietary (often very cheap) hardware that causes endless problems for users. For a long time it was very useful for people who installed GNU/Linux on a new laptop to put up a page on the web documenting what was needed to make it work so that we could share progress in the struggle. And it was always a struggle. I have done that and it was useful. But I stopped doing it when I started using ThinkPads. The reason is that I stopped needing to do anything special to install a working system on a ThinkPad. Everything just worked. Having used other brands it was always like being beaten with a stick. Moving to the ThinkPad was like having the pain stop. The ThinkPads traditionally have been just very normal and standard hardware. Being mainstream this meant the Linux kernel drivers were sufficient and well supported. This is what made them so nice. But as unsupported wifi chips and graphics drivers get added to newer machines this means that now you have to be careful not to get one of those. Now you have to watch out and make sure the components are supportable. I don't think future ThinkPads will be as uniformly supportable as the older models. On various ThinkPads of mine and others I have replaced fans (three), keyboards (once), individual keys (once), display (backlight died), busted plastic case parts (once). You can repair them. And taking them apart and putting them together with the new parts is usually pretty straight-forward. My 2004 T42 is still running great. Bob
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