Recently, I’ve made another shift in my hardware. My Alpine powered X61T (aka Hill, after a certain S.H.I.E.L.D. agent) is now officially retired and my W10 powered E6430S (aka Stark, after guess who) returns to retireee status.
In their place, a new “old” ThinkPad X1 Carbon takes their place. It’s a Gen 9, making it not so terribly obsolete at running modern software as Stark’s 14 year old processor. Compared to my X61 and T61 it also avoids that “Oh god, it’s the world wide web!” impact of using a web browser on a 21? year old processor. Actually, I think its the only time I’ve had a ThinkPad that isn’t considered thrift store vintage.
For lack of better ideas, I’ve named the system Xavier after Professor X. Both because it’s a 5 year old machine and because it’s purpose is to be an experimental secondary machine. Given the relatively modern processor, its initial operating system is Fedora Kinoite–something not to ancient, and theoretically not too easily broken.
On the hardware front, I’m finding it quite nicely. It’s an i7-1185G7 model with mid-level 16G of RAM, meaning that it has the same limitations as a development machine that Stark had, but can at least handle the ungodly heavy load that web browsers have become since Ivy Bridge. More useful to me personally, is it’s equipped with Tigerlake-LP chipset offering Thunderbolt which makes it possible to use my CalDigit TS4 alongside Shion and Ranga. For bonus points, i don’t even need a special charger, haha! Personally, I’m not a fan of ThinkPads, but they’re great machines to buy used especially if you can get a good deal.
Software wise, I find things a wee bit more of a mixed bag. Being an rpm-ostree based distro, system updates are quite stable. The actual user experience is a bit more akin to any problem can be solved, if you’re willing to delete your user account and start from scratch, or spend a few hours debugging which file in your home directory fucks the whole thing. On the flipside, it does actually work quite well most of the time, and it really is meant to be a test bed machine. If I assigned my computers a registry number rather than a hostname, it would probably have a Y or X prefix to it. It remains to be seen if I’ll transition the machine over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD or good old Debian, but we’re see how it goes with the atomic respin.