My work laptop is terrible. About a year and a half ago, when I started my current gig, I received an Asus Zenbook that has been the bane of my existence ever since. First, it is impossible to work outside on this shiny monstrosity: all you see is your own dumb face squinting back at you, slightly obscured by very noticeable fingerprints from its mirror-like screen. Why are there fingerprints on the screen? Because, oh yeah, it’s a terrible touchscreen for no real reason. While the keyboard is serviceable, it is far from being a joy to use. There are no physical mouse buttons which, on a Linux install, means I’m forever flailing, trying to get middle-click paste to work (LPT: I setup an xdotool shortcut to paste – doesn’t work in Emacs though…). The Asus has also succumb to the Apple-esque use of dongles to replace all necessary ports (like Ethernet, FFS).

The final straw for this ridiculous machine was, for a reason that is beyond me, UEFI occasionally loses track of the boot drives and (although you can still see(!) the .efi file on disk via the UEFI interface) it won’t let you add it as a boot drive until you’ve sweated enough and/or there is a sufficiently powerful cosmic ray to flip the bits necessary to allow you to continue your life. This problem pretty much killed my productivity at my last offsite – as a result I decided to drop $500 and get a refurb ThinkPad X220 with more RAM and a bigger SSD than the ($1800) Zenbook.

X-Series ThinkPads are niiiiice ¶ I have been using a ThinkPad X230t for the past 3 years, and, although the tablet is a little bulky, it has been everything I need in a work laptop – matte screen, physical buttons for all the things, an Ethernet port – it’s basically not an unbelievably stupid laptop design (which is the bar now, evidently). The X220 I purchased for work is even better – it’s slightly smaller (since it’s not also a Wacom tablet), plus the X220 has a nice keyboard – which – holy shit! – remember when anyone actually cared about laptop keyboards‽