anogrebattle
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
I picked up my first ThinkPad, an X1 Carbon with a i7-10710U and touchscreen, on sale last year and installed Manjaro Linux (with a vanilla Gnome DE). It's not a perfect hardware/software integration - the fingerprint reader doesn't work and neither does the onboard mic with the 5.4 kernel - but otherwise this is one of the best laptops I've ever used.
I don't think of it as a workstation. It's a portable premium keyboard with a decent screen attached. It's been great for light web dev and long form typing on the ~go~ couch. It barely weighs anything in my bag. Battery life on Linux is comparable to what I was getting on Windows, which is ~8 hours for light use.
Speaking of batteries, I had some issues with my battery not being recognized recently (it started by randomly reporting 0% charge before the machine started refusing to charge it altogether). The Lenovo support experience was surprisingly fast. I dropped off the machine at FedEx on a Tuesday morning and it was back in my hands by that Friday afternoon.
If you're thinking about going down the same path, my advice is that the Arch wiki is your friend.
Wake up - read about code. At work - find good excuses to do my job with code. Come home from work - code. After dinner - code. Before bed - code.
And so on. I also got lucky because I found a couple engineers at my company who were willing to mentor my early projects. What kept me going was finding projects I thought were interesting and challenging and learning everything I could to solve them.
As a lot of commenters have said, we're all learning all the time. The learning never ends! There's never a better time to start than now!