I got a Lenovo thinkpad T490 in November 2019. It came with windows 10 home, 8GB built-in (soldered to board) RAM and 256 GB SSD with i5-8265u CPU (1.6GHz) quad core. Display size is 14" (1080p). Thinkpads are known for their excellent keyboard and i wanted to get a laptop with a good keyboard for mostly coding and personal learning (taking notes and practicing as a i learn something new). I got a macbook pro in 2015 and it still serves me well but it is a 15" macbook pro which is heavy to carry around. The T490 weighs about 3lbs and is pretty sleek.
I got a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM to upgrade the laptop. There is only one SSD slot so i had to replace the 256GB SSD with 1TB one. There is one external RAM slot and it had nothing on it so i added the 16GB RAM to it thus making total of 24GB RAM. Then i installed Ubuntu 19.10 (the latest as of that time) and instalation was a breeze. With the upgraded hardware, Ubuntu works very well.
I have since been using this as my main laptop at home. For taking any notes i find onlyoffice a great free alternative to MS Word. Other developer tools i use are terminator primarily for running kubectl, docker, vi, git etc. For IDE, i use intellij or pyCharm or VS Code. Terminator lets one split the terminal into multiple terminals all visible within the same window. This makes working on say a docker swarm cluster for example easy when we can be logged in each cluster node in the different terminals within the same window and be able to see each of them at the same time. This helps being more productive seeing all terminals side by side at the same time instead of having to switch between windows or tabs.
On the downside, battery life is not so great with Ubuntu and gives a 2-3 hrs of run time only (though i have read that battery life is much better with Windows 10 so it is more of an integration issue with Ubuntu). Also i have not setup fingerprint reader with Ubuntu but it did not work out of the box post install.
Update 04/17/20:
I updated to 20.04 Ubuntu (Focal) beta. The upgrade was pretty smooth from 19.10 to 20.04 LTS. It runs 5.4.0 Linux Kernel. I use Ubuntu with Gnome/Unity desktop environment. I am yet to explore all the new features in this release but so far have changed to Night Mode settings and this cuts down on the blue light effect of the screen during night time thus making it easier to use the laptop for long.
I seldom use my Macbook pro 2015 laptop and most of the learning (my main purpose behind getting a Linux laptop) is being met by T490 very well. Battery life remains to be an issue even with the newer release and i was hoping it will come close to the performance people claim they get when running Windows 10 on T490.
I got a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM to upgrade the laptop. There is only one SSD slot so i had to replace the 256GB SSD with 1TB one. There is one external RAM slot and it had nothing on it so i added the 16GB RAM to it thus making total of 24GB RAM. Then i installed Ubuntu 19.10 (the latest as of that time) and instalation was a breeze. With the upgraded hardware, Ubuntu works very well.
I have since been using this as my main laptop at home. For taking any notes i find onlyoffice a great free alternative to MS Word. Other developer tools i use are terminator primarily for running kubectl, docker, vi, git etc. For IDE, i use intellij or pyCharm or VS Code. Terminator lets one split the terminal into multiple terminals all visible within the same window. This makes working on say a docker swarm cluster for example easy when we can be logged in each cluster node in the different terminals within the same window and be able to see each of them at the same time. This helps being more productive seeing all terminals side by side at the same time instead of having to switch between windows or tabs.
On the downside, battery life is not so great with Ubuntu and gives a 2-3 hrs of run time only (though i have read that battery life is much better with Windows 10 so it is more of an integration issue with Ubuntu). Also i have not setup fingerprint reader with Ubuntu but it did not work out of the box post install.
Update 04/17/20:
I updated to 20.04 Ubuntu (Focal) beta. The upgrade was pretty smooth from 19.10 to 20.04 LTS. It runs 5.4.0 Linux Kernel. I use Ubuntu with Gnome/Unity desktop environment. I am yet to explore all the new features in this release but so far have changed to Night Mode settings and this cuts down on the blue light effect of the screen during night time thus making it easier to use the laptop for long.
I seldom use my Macbook pro 2015 laptop and most of the learning (my main purpose behind getting a Linux laptop) is being met by T490 very well. Battery life remains to be an issue even with the newer release and i was hoping it will come close to the performance people claim they get when running Windows 10 on T490.
