Tuesday, November 18, 2014

ThinkPad t440s + Ubuntu

Several weeks ago I have purchased a ThinkPad t440s as I needed a new laptop for development. I was looking at several options including Carbon X1 and MacBook Pro. Having been using Ubuntu for quite some time I decided that I do not want to go with Mac. I also recently switched from iPhone to Nexus 5 so it did not seem like a good choice to me. And it was expensive. Between X1 and t440s, after some research, I found that t440s will suit my needs much better. I also use Lenovo at my work, but unlike that one (W520) which looks and feels like a big brick, t440s is a really elegant laptop. I was worried a bit that there might be some incompatibility with Ubuntu based on some reviews, but this was not the case. The main issue everyone was complaining about was the new touchpad. It supports multi gesture and it has entire area clickable. Ubuntu works almost perfectly with it (few glitches here and there but nothing major). In fact, after switching back to traditional one, it seems very unnatural to use the old one. You can do almost everything with one hand easily with the new touchpad.

I also upgraded my t440s with SSD hard drive and additional 8GB memory and added better wireless network card, but other than that, it was good to go. I opted to go with lower resolution monitor because I just like bigger letters on my screen as some of the applications do not scale well on high resolution monitors. Default Ubuntu installation took some time to organise to my liking, but after that it was just fantastic! Right now, startup time is ~10sec and sleep and hibernate work great! Two batteries last forever (6-7 hours) and they are very light. I also found this cool wallpaper to use from http://wallpaperswide.com/.


Cheers!

Note: Now after 2 years of usage, I can say that everything stands for this laptop that I wrote except for the battery. Unfortunately, its capacity is down to 50% for both batteries and barely last 2.5 hrs.