Would go with Fedora or Opensuse if you want to have something that just works. Try endevouros or Arch if you wanna thinker/play around with your os
this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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I've had less "just works" luck with OPENSUSE than with Arch.
I'm using Fedora on a second hand x380 Yoga and it works rather nicely.
Nixos
NixOS is anything but lightweight...
Yes, NixOS does need quite a bit of RAM while rebuilding (~1GB) and takes lots of storage because it keeps older generations (similar to OS snapshots) around.
Otherwise NixOS isn't any more resource intensive than other OS. Anecdotal experience, but my NixOS system boots faster than Fedora Atomic with the same window manager and packages installed.
In any case, I've been using NixOS, Fedora Atomic and OpenSUSE MicroOS on my T480s without problems, so OP will be fine with any distro.
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Anything in the fedora stable will work great (redhat literally gave out T480s to their devs) I recommend whatever ublue variant floats your boat., atomic updates baby. If you're smart you'll get some PTM7950 and never need to repaste.
I have a similar ThinkPad, I run Mint with LxQt, though xfce is a good option too
I have a T560 and i run debian with sway. It serves the dual purpose of getting me more comfortable in the terminal (i even use power shell on my windowa desk top a lot more now), and it runs much better than KDE or gnome did. Im missing some obvious quality of life settings like easily adjusting the power settings (it never sleeps, just turns off the screen and locks). But again, im trying to get more comfortable using the terminal so for me its more of a "take the training wheels off" thing.
If you got a Nvidia dGPU I recommend PopOS. It gave me the best energy options and ability to switch between iGPU and dGPU out of the box. It even found new firmware for my T480 and installed it without a hitch.
Kubuntu works well on mine. A friend has Lubuntu on his.
mint is nice but fedora KDE runs also pretty well on my thinkpad x1 yoga gen3
I would put pop os on it
I daily a t480 with Manjaro and absolutely love it. It's real snappy and even the hybrid graphics work flawlessly.
In beta stage yet, but Cosmic might become the most stable in a few years. I've never seen an open source general purpose Linux DE with that level of seriousness from a business company.
Slackware with it's Xfce session would be pretty good
Arch is you know how to use Arch. If lazy then something like Bhodi or Q4OS. I put the latter on a couple of friend's laptops who recently jumped from Windows. Since it is very Windows-like but it uses less than 400mb of RAM to run on a cold boot.
I'm a big fan of Debian stable for school / work laptops. Older packages aren't great, but if you aren't someone who needs the newest libreoffice version or something, it works fine. Updates will basically never break it apart from major releases (which you have a few years before you have to worry about, although you can upgrade sooner).
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