We all know the sterotype of the average linux enthusiast putting linux on pretty much everything that they own..... And I am a victim of that unfortunately. I have installed linux on so many machines, so this was going to be a piece of cake for me.
(rubber duck added cuz why not lol)
This bad boy was only 40$ on facebook marketplace. It's missing the "i" key but these are very modular, which means its easily replaceable. Looking on amazon at the moment im typing this, a entire keyboard replacemet is only 20 bucks. The kid I bought this from looked like he didnt know much about computers, which benefited me greatly because these go for about 80$ on ebay, and is 200$ on amazon. (not going to link any listings because those will most definetley go down soon). After I bought this laptop, I rushed home and did what anyother normal human being would do with an old thinkpad..... Delete windoze and install Linux.
Like I mentioned earlier, old thinkpads like these are very modular. You could replace just about anything in these things, and do it fairly easily. Due to their very "open" nature, you can also install any OS you want. Thinkpads and Linux go hand in hand. There also extremley durable and robust, meaning you could drop this thing off of the space needle and it would still turn on and boot up. Being the chad computer engineering student that I am, I installed Arch linux. the process for installing arch is much easier nowadays (thank god) because they recently implemented the arch-install command in the live arch install environment, which makes the install process wayyyyyyyy easier then it was in the past. Die hard arch losers hate on the arch-install command, but nothing beats convenience imo.
When the install was finished, it was time for me to install some sort of desktop environment..... Right?....... WRONG! I installed a window manager because I ain't no loser. And what better window manager to install then DWM? Due to this laptops (somewhat) low specs, I have to compromise convenience with a desktop environment for speed and usability. I strictly only use DWM for my linux based machines anyways, so this was no issue for me. There needs to be little to no bloat on installations that are on low spec machines, and DWM is perfect for that. DWM is written in C too, which further proves my point of speed and usability :)
I absolutley love this thing. I use it mainly to code with in nano (yes I use nano.... Learning vim is a work in progress) for my C++ class in college. I also used this to code in C from time to time. I like the idea of taking old slow hardware with bloated software **cough** windows **cough** and updating the hardware as well as the softare to make it faster and usable again. Linux can be put on just about anything. Your grandma's pacemaker probably runs some sort of modified version of Linux.