A new laptop
After about 14 years, it’s time to say goodnight to my trusty T61 ThinkPad. It’s quite a testament to the quality of the classic ThinkPads that apart from upgrading the hard drive and replacing the battery pack a few years ago, the hardware is working just as well as it did when I got it “slightly used” from my university’s recycle pile.
But, the time has finally come for a replacement, and after a bit of searching I’ve settled on System76’s Pangolin laptop. Chief among the things I was looking for in a new laptop was an Ethernet port (surprisingly hard to find now on some model lines), plenty of RAM, ability for repair, and good out-of-box Linux support. The Pangolin fits that, and for the past week I’ve been pretty pleased with it. The laptop arrived with Pop!_OS pre-installed, but of course I promptly installed Debian bookworm. ;)
Oh, and across pretty much every metric it’s an order of magnitude faster than my T61 – kind of fun to make those performance jumps and appreciate how hardware keeps improving year over year.
Memory speeds on the new Pangolin laptop
Memory speeds on the old T61 laptop