Changing my personal laptop

This month, I finally decided to change my personal laptop. Since 2018, I have been using a Lenovo ThinkPad X230 with an i5 3380m and 8GB of RAM. I bought it used, and was very happy with it. Over the years, I added a second SSD, bought a new battery, and replaced the thermal paste once. It performed very well throughout, and thanks to its small size, I was able to carry it conveniently many times.

Time passed, and I started wanting something newer and bigger, but at the same time of similar weight. I chose a used ThinkPad again. This time it's the T480s model with the i7 8650U and 24GB of RAM (I don't know what to do with this amount, even my work laptop only has 16 GB). So far, I think it was a good choice. The build quality is great, the screen is bigger and nicer, and finally, it has 1080p.

I have been using the same Manjaro installation for these six years on my X230, and have never had any major problems with it. Of course, some updates required manual intervention, but whenever this happened, the solution was posted on the Manjaro forum. Tools that come with the distro like Pamac or Kernel Manager included in the settings were nice. The philosophy behind Manjaro is like a double-edged sword. Blocking updates for two weeks sometimes causes problems with packages installed using the Arch User Repository because community-created scripts assume that we are using the Arch Linux repository and can update some dependencies to a newer version. For this reason, and because I want to try something more advanced this time, I decided to install Vanilla Arch Linux.

Time will tell if it was a good choice. In the future, I will try to describe my experience with Arch Linux on this blog.