Thinkpads Forum

So I have found my own answers. So instead of deleting this thread, I'd like to post about my choices for my x60t and ask for yours as well.

Computer: X60T
Distribution: Xubuntu
File Manager: Thunar (Default)
Various Programs:
Xournal - Note taking
Synapse - Quick ctrl-space and I can search and quickly launch any program or file (Useful in Laptop Mode, when in Tablet Mode I use a XFCE4 panel similar to OSX for programs)
AbiWord - Light document editor
LeafPad - Extremely light text editor
Opera - Browser (Chosen for built email capabilities and a great Android counterpart)
VLC - Plays EVERYTHING
InkScape - Image Editor
MyPaint - Art program
Eclipse - Java IDE
NINJA-IDE - Python IDE (Going to learn python soon...)
CellWriter - On-screen Keyboard
Ubuntu Tweak - Making Ubuntu EASY.

Check out my guide in my signature for getting tablet stuff working. What do you use?

I have had good results running different versions of Ubuntu, Puppy, Fatdog, and my favorite the past three years LinuxMint. Currently, I run LinuxMint 13 maya (mate) and LinuxMint maya (KDE) in an AMD Turion II Edge. I've tried Ultimate Edition 3.4 and 3.5 with good results.

I've tried a lot of Linux distros in my T-60 and a T-42 (I no longer own).

The only problems I had to solve is a problem in many touchpad laptops, problem of the Touchpad seriously messing up date entry, particularly text. The larger or more centrally located the touchpad the bigger the problem. I solve it by turning it off and using a wireless mouse, which I prefer anyway.

An issue I continue to have with my particular AMD Turion Edge is audio will not transmit via HDMI. It does so fine under Windows 7, which I hate but so far I havent been able to get audio working with any Linux distro. I suspect it is related to the AMD audio hardware.

Computer: T410
Distribution: Fedora 18
DE: GNOME 3.6.2 (Default)
-=-
Various Programs:

Evolution: E-mail (default)
Midori: Web Browser
LaTeXila: TeX editor w/ syntax highlighting
gedit: plain text editor
bluefish: text editor good for php/x(ht)ml,javascript
totem: multimedia player (with fluendo codecs)
AbiWord: light word processing (actually usually I just use LaTeX)
Gnumeric: spreadsheet
Dia: Diagram tool
GIMP: bitmap image editor
-=-
Wishlist:

I want a port of Notepad++ to Linux.

You can see what Distros I use in my sig. I use Debian on my desktop systems. I also am running Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome3 desktop on a fujitsu tablet. i am interested in this thread as I have an X41t project sitting in cue in my office. I hope to replace my current eeepc netbook(Xubuntu) and fujitsu slate(Ubuntu) tablet with this one system. I started with Unity on the tablet and that was pretty decent. I think gnome3 is slightly easier to use with the stylus though. Bodhi might be an ok choice as e17 is stylus friendly too. Bodhi interface does not look as pollished imo. It looks "cheap". Not quite sure what path I will go down. Maybe I will take some time and get a pure Debian setup going. Make it exactly what I want it to be.

I installed Bodhi w/E17 as one of the OS's on my X220. I find Bodhi the most responsive (fastest) of all of them. Also have Fedora 18 Gnome, Mageia 2 KDE, and Arch XFCE installed.

I do not find the Bodhi interface looking "cheap". I rather like Bodhi, but there are a few quirks imo (probably debian related). For instance: there are no separate user and root accounts afaict - just one account. To actually run something as root I find "sudo -i" works (no password required). Doesn't seem very secure.

GomJabbar wrote:I rather like Bodhi, but there are a few quirks imo (probably debian related). For instance: there are no separate user and root accounts afaict - just one account. To actually run something as root I find "sudo -i" works (no password required). Doesn't seem very secure.

Bodhi is Ubuntu based, not Debian based. Debian certainly has separate root and user accounts. Ubuntu defaults to using sudo. Run a few "useradd" and "passwd" commands and edit /etc/group to remove users from sudo group. Or "apt-get remove sudo". Most live disks run with one user as user and root. I agree that is is not very safe to do this, but it is easy.

Computer: X200s
Distribution: Arch Linux
File Manager: Midnight Commander
Various Programs:
Xournal - Note taking
Libre Office - Office Suite
GVIM - Extremely light text editor
Firefox - Browser (Chosen for built email capabilities and a great Android counterpart)
MPlayer - Plays EVERYTHING
InkScape - Image Editor
Krita - Art program
Eclipse - Java IDE
Redcar - Ruby IDE
KeePass X - Password manager
Geany - IDE (used for C programming)
Terminator - Terminal emulator
Oh My ZSH! - ZSHell customization
Epdfview - PDF viewer
Calibre - Ebook library management
Steam - Games

Written from my GT-N8010 using Tapatalk 2

I run Debian Squeeze on an X60 Tablet. Works beautifully. GNOME2 was especially capable of taking advantage of the screen's real estate - too bad the display broke down, for it was one of those 1400x1050 monsters (okay, I helped it die a bit by connecting the inverter, err, inversely).
Now, if I was to upgrade, I'm not sure I would choose to stay with GNOME. XFCE or LXDE seem like saner choices for now, until some developers pluck their heads out of the sand and start listening to users' woes.
Still, the best bet has always been going here and seeing who has a good pedigree, then sticking to the distro thus chosen:
http://futurist.se/gldt/

(hint hint: Debian has had tp_smapi packaged for years, and it's always worked flawlessly for me - to the point I was able to play Neverball using the built-in accelerometer... before today's tablets even existed!)

Scientific Linux on a T400 (soon to be swapped with a X200). It is very conservative Gnome 2.x based and rock solid, and supported for another ten years. See the screenshots thread for my pretty standard setup.

Standard programs used frequently: LyX, Firefox, gVim, VLC, DOSBox, VirtualBox, KeepassX, Dropbox, etc.

One addition: our last hard disk failure (actually, the file allocation table corrupted) resulted in our decision to pay for a cloud-based backup service. I was able to save all of our family photos, but the filenames and folder structures were lost resulting in months of sorting and deduplicating (batch rename was quick based on timestamps in the meta data). Once this settled, we decided on SpiderOak as a paid encrypted cloud backup which is multi-platform (works on the Windows desktop and her Mac as well as my Thinkpads).

Two things I would like to see ported from Windows are PacketTracer (a Cisco Academy learning aid that we still use to set up networks and can copy/paste the configs to working routers) and ANY decent OCR software for PDF scans.

BTW, for whoever requested Notepad++, UltraEdit is available for Linux.

I am a BSD user at heart, but for all practical purposes, that ship has sailed.

I'm using Ubuntu on my R60e. I'll upgrade to Ringtail later this month. I only use it to surf, play a few games and write my reviews, for the 1050 vertical. I only install a few card games on it

Debian Wheezy 64 XFCE.
Works great in all of my machines.

Installed Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) XFCE on my T42 last week. Works great! Very light distro but more than enough eye candy for me. It's also pretty fast and snappy to. Had to iron out a few things such as tap and scroll on the touchpad but that was no biggie.

For anyone looking for a lightweight but have some eye candy non-pae distro I highly recommend giving this distro a try.

I typically use SuSE. That being said, I did use Ubuntu 8 and 9 for a bit.

I grew up on the BSD's and RedHat when they came out, but the first Linux I ever bought was SuSE 5.0. I paid $50 for it at Fry's Electronics and it came with a mousepad, sticker and a pin. As well as floppies for booting if the PC was to old not to support the El Torito spec and the rest of the OS was on CD's. So you could say I've been a SuSE man most of my computing life with a few dabblings in Mandrake and Fedora with about a year of heavy Arch thrown in for good measure. But I always come back to SuSE. It's like a good friend always there patiently waiting for me to return from my travels in the outside world and ask how things went. My typical response would be that things went well, but it is always good to come home. Then we go inside and talk over a nice bowl of hearty stew and a mug of spiced tea.

There's just something about SuSE that speaks to me. It may sound a bit weird, but but have always just understood how SuSE works. It's easy to work with, powerful when needed and just works. No cryptic messages, or any of that. I am also the type of Linux person who loves to dive into code and the CLI. Got a shell script to modify? I'm there. Your rd.c acting up? Shoot me a copy and I'll take a look. I just love Linux. I also love Windows, having been raised on DOS and the MS way since the DOS 3.3 days.

But Linux, Linux has always held a special place in my heart. The best of CLI and GUI all rolled into one. The only reason it is not my primary OS is OneNote. Yes, it can technically be run in WINE, but it runs like [censored] and we all know it. If it weren't for that, I'd happily wipe Windows and boot into SuSE proudly every day.

Ubuntu 12.10 w/ Cinnamon.

I don't run anything too crazy on my Thinkpad. I'm a web developer, work mostly with Ruby on Rails.

Main Programs:
Sublime Text 2 as my text editor of choice.
Pidgin/Skype/HexChat for messaging.
Firefox as my main browser. Chromium is secondary.
Yakuake, a quake like terminal (I prefer it over Guake because it supports window splitting, I use tmux as well).

Enhancements:
Caffeine to disable screensaver.
RedShift for color temperature adjustment.
Unclutter, hides the mouse after a set period.
Synapse for my quick launcher.
TLP, set of scripts to automate power management for Thinkpads.
Thinkfan, control fanspeeds for Thinkpads.

Cinnamon Enhancements:
gTile, easy window tile management.
Network Data Usage Monitor, taskbar widget that displays traffic in/output.
System Monitor, taskbar widget that displays cpu %, current mhz, memory %, cpu temp.
Windows List with App Grouping, Windows 7 like program taskbar, where it only displays the program icon and stacks any related programs.

Media:
Clementine, for music.
Nuvola Player, for playing streaming music sites like 8tracks.
VLC, is great for videos.

Utilities:
Virtualbox for virtualization (mostly Win7 for Turbo Tax and OSX for the Iphone simulator).
DragonDisk for Amazon S3 bucket file management.
Dropbox for file syncing.

ArchLinux with Gnome here.
Installed:
Clementine
TLP
XSensors
SMPlayer
Matlab
Virtualbox - mainly to connect my Polar RC3 GPS
Dropbox
Skype
Chrome

and I guess it is all

Arch user here, but with KDE. Menwhile it is not installed on any Thinkpad but on my trusted old Dell, but i have got a few Thinkpads with broken hardware which will run that as well once repaired

I use pretty much default KDE apps except

Firefox (use it in second priority for stuff Konqueror won't open)
Clementine
VLC (for stuff Dragon Player won't open)
LibreOffice (for stuff Koffice is not capable of)
Fritzing electronics drawing
GIMP

Fedora 20 on an ancient Dell Studio 1535.

Debian 7 "Wheezy" XFCE. 64-bit on my X61, 32-bit on a Frankenpad T42/R52 I intend to give to a friend.

I was having some problems with Bodhi w/Enlightenment, so I replaced it with SparkyLinux w/Enlightenment. SparkyLinux is based on Debian Testing as I understand it. Sparky has more up to date software than Bodhi. So far, so good...

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sparky

One thing to note: I tried to register on the SparkyLinux forum but kept getting redirected to Google with a 405 error. I believe the problem is that the forum is on Google + which I am not going to be a part of. I am not totally anti-Google, but I am concerned about my privacy.

Lately, SuSE has been irritating me. So I have been using LinuxMint more and more.

I finally understand KDE 4, and I really like it. When it first came out, I didn't understand what they were doing. But then again I also still think that MacOS 9 had one of the best UI's ever. So when they got rid of the UI in KDE 3.5, I didn't understand why. It was fast, worked great, was easily customized and got out of the way. So in an effort to have a minimal UI so I could *gasp* do work, I switched to Gnome 2. Then they broke it with Gnome 3. So I moved again. I moved back in time to AfterStep. Man I miss that UI. I thought it was great and it ran on a lot Sparc hardware which I used when I was in the Navy. So there are a lot of memories there. I am currently testing the latest version of LinuxMint in a VM. If it's up to snuff, I'll repartition my hard disk and set it up as dual boot.

Then after that is done, I am going to see how the latest version of Wine handles OneNote. If it works reasonably well, then I can finally ditch windows. Outlook already runs pretty well and connects just fine to Exchange mailboxes in an AD environment. So if I could get decent performance out of OneNote in Linux, then I should be good to go.

T61:
archlinux
archbang linux
windows 8.1

Now i have nVidia ... so i will b running this same options and i will use my other t61 for small cloud type thing with archbang or arch linux

T440s: gentoo, kde4
old laptop: Toshiba U400, gentoo kde3
home desktop: gentoo, kde3

t61: crunchbang linux
t60: arch linux
t23: crunchbang linux

I use the FLWM manager for crunchbang and ratpoison for arch.

X201i - Linux Mint MATE 17 - Setting it up tolearn with Ruby/Ruby on Rails

Gnome player
Libre Office
Vim
Tmux
FF30
VLC
RVM

TLP
INXI

Scientific Linux 6.5: stable RHEL-based distro suitable for a workstation, and ships Gnome 2. Provides some hurdles for repo compatibility, but worth the trouble.

LibreOffice
SciLab
Deja-Dup (handy backup software)
Rhythmbox
Evolution
Eclipse

Thinkpad X60, Slackware 14.0.

vim for writing
firefox for surfing.
qemu-kvm for windows.
ion3 as window manager.
Plays quakeworld on an external CRT monitor

Vector linux 7.0 on my T40p. Very smooth. I use firefox, chromium and seamonkey. No reason for the multiple browsers, just like to try different things.

Added 2 more Thinkpads

X61T - Ubuntu 14.04 mainly for drawing graphics - was Fedora 21 but that had issues consistently booting correctly with the wacom digitizer.

GIMP
Inkscape
MyPaint
Scribus

Firefox 31 - Surfing

Mahjong

Rhythmnbox - Streaming and music.

X61S - Archbang 64Bit general text stuff plus Arch testbed

Openbox WM
Libre Office
Vim
Gnome Player
VLC
Firefox Browser

incidently the only distro that has working bluetooth with my headphones.

Well Linux Mint 17 KDE has been up and running on my T410 for a while now. I even got Office 2010 installed by using PlayOnLinux.

Now If I can figure out how to update my install of Office to include Service Pack 2, I'll be al set. Man it's nice to be able to access all my OneNote files in Linux using the native program. Not that I found a linux app capable of opening OneNote files. The original plan was to install a Windows 7 VM in VirtualBox, then install Office. But I found a nice tutorial on getting it installed.

I should note that this laptop does NOT dual boot anything. It's a pure linux box, and it's bloody fast. The i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, Nvidia GPU and most importantly - the 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD all come together to provide me with a very fast, portable linux workstation. I used it everyday. I haven't even touched my D630 in a few weeks now. I am loving this machine + linux so very much.

T60 : Gentoo with XFCE

Some of the more frequently used programs I have installed are.
Geany
Leafpad
XFCE Terminal
RawTherapee
GIMP
Firefox
Clemantine
Libre Office