(if you try this, note that ebay will try to trick you into buying a shitty T480s when you search for T480; do not be fooled! check the model number and don't assume that you're looking at what you actually want just because it showed up in the search results)
after some prodding on IRC I gave another shot at doing a #netbsd install on my thinkpad X260
I'm not sure what I did wrong last time, but this time it came up just fine? suspend and wifi are solid
so what I've observed with six data points is a 100% success rate on thinkpads from within the last ten years and a 0% success rate on thinkpads older than ten years, which is, uh, not at all what I'm used to from linux where older generally means better-supported, but ... I'll take it?
my X260 was my main machine, so before I put NetBSD on it I swapped the drive with its Debian install out into this T410 (where I'd tried and failed to put netbsd ~a month ago)
and I just can't get over how much nicer the T410 is overall with its classic keyboard, better aspect ratio, and matte display (if only it ran netbsd!)
I could just stick with the X260 and not buy a T480 now that it's booting NetBSD, but the display is just soooo bad... I can put up with the keyboard because I'm often using at external kb anyway
as much as I'd like a T480 I'd rather not make this thing e-waste unnecessarily, but if I'm gonna stick with this as my main I'm going to have to at least look into replacing the display with a matte one, ugh
@technomancy It reminds me that I want to try and find some replacement parts so I can keep my working T480 serviceable for a long time. I love my MNT hardware and repair it but sometimes I just need a boring amd64 machine with no device tree nonsense. I'm hoping once I receive my MNT Reform Next that I help contribute time to making sure NetBSD and OpenBSD are usable.
Oct 13, 2026, 9:32 PM@technomancy what's worse about the T480s?
@gbrnt the battery isn't replaceable, shorter battery life, fewer ports, and harder to repair, I think? thinner design just necessitates bad compromises
I accidentally bought one for my kids years ago but it broke a while back and I'm fuzzy on the details
@gbrnt comparing it to newer models, it might not be that bad; I was just mad that they sold me one when I specifically asked for a model where I could swap the battery out
Oct 13, 2026, 10:46 PM@technomancy ahh yeah that's fair, I got a librebootedd t480s from minifree and was wondering what I was missing out on
@gbrnt in retrospect it's not a bad machine honestly; I'm just salty I got tricked by ebay!
@technomancy if you want to sell me a laptop, again lol, i guess i could buy an x260 to try netbsd on myself (i think it would work ok on my x220 because my friend used to run netbsd on it, but i dont really want to mess with dual booting rn).
@artemis glossy screen isn't too much of a deal killer for you? I still have the original screen too which is matte but it's low res and pretty dim
if you're interested tho it could be a good excuse for me to "splurge" on that t480 lmao
@technomancy oof glossy. i'd rather have the original screen, i hate high res screens on the X line anyway. my x220 rocks a 1366x768 matte TN panel and thats the way i like it
@technomancy but yeah, my only other laptop candidate for netbsd rn is like my vaio, which has a number of issues. not least of which, netbsd doesnt have the driver that linux has to let it memory map the LCD framebuffer and change video modes. so it's stuck in high res mode, and the laptop's VGA compatibility layer has too much overhead and heavily bottlenecks screen updates
@technomancy lmk if the hdmi out works though, ive had issues with hdmi on skylake integrated graphics with netbsd in the past, but it was on a desktop machine
@artemis I'll check the displayport and HDMI; they worked fine on debian but lemme see what netbsd thinks of them and get back to you