I got a new workstation last month, a 14" laptop from the ThinkPad T
series. The complete guide
for TuxMobil about installing
Arch Linux on it
is here.
It replaced a (thicker and heavier)
13" HP
ProBook 4320s which I used a little over a year, before giving up
on it. In some ways ProBook was excellent, certified for SUSE
Linux it had complete Linux support down to the most
insignificant hardware components. In other ways it was the worst
laptop I ever used. That ProBook series has chiclet-style keyboards,
and I had no idea just how horrible they can be. Completely flat keys,
widely spread and with bad feedback caused me a lot of wrist
pain. Even after a year I never got used to the keyboard, and I was
making a lot of typos, on average I would miss-type even my login
every second boot. At the most basic level my job can be described as
a "typist" so all this is just plain unacceptable.
The touchpad however is worse than the keyboard. It's a "clickpad",
with one big surface serving as both the touchpad area and the button
area. To get it in a usable state
a number
of patches
are needed, coupled with an
extensive user-space
configuration. But even after a year of tweaking it was never just
right. The most basic of operations like selecting text, dragging
windows or pressing the middle button is an exercise in
patience. Sadly clickpads are present in a huge number of
laptops today.
Compared to the
excellent UltraNav
device in the ThinkPad they are worlds apart. Same is true of the
keyboard in T420, which is simply the best laptop keyboard I've ever
used. I stand behind these words as I just ordered another T420, for
personal use. One could say these laptops are in different categories,
but that's not entirely true. I had to avoid
the latest ThinkPad models because of the
chiclet-style keyboards they now have. Lenovo is claiming that's
"keyboard evolution", to me they just seem cheaper to produce, and
this machine could be the last ThinkPad I'll ever own. If this trend
continues I don't know where to turn next for decent professional
grade hardware.