My New (To Me) Lenvo X131e

My old Intel NUC had been getting pretty long in the tooth and after rearranging the basement, I found myself without a desk to put it. So I found myself in need of a new Linux computer. After about a decade without a Linux laptop, I decided to try again as I'd heard through word-of-mouth that power management under linux had reached a point where reasonably common laptops could be slept without too much trouble.

Unfortunately for me at the time of writing this (September 2021) the lingering effect of pandemic shortages and work-from-home were still at play and my desired laptop (a Thinkpad X230 or newer) was still selling well above pre-pandemic levels. I ran across someone who had experienced a similar problem, and decided to look for something unusual. It seems that the used laptop market is similar to that of cars. While used cars are fetching record high prices, the transaction prices of "vintage" ones haven't changed all that much. I suppose that while collecting smaller items like Michael Jordan rookie cards went out of control, people still didn't have room in their driveways for a project Corvette.

https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/047_x131e_repair/

Motivated by the blog post, I decided to go on the hunt for a decent-condition X131e. The X131e is the Windows version of Lenovo's first (or at least one of the first) Chromebooks. The "e" stands for education. Unlike the Chromebook, it has a replacable SATA drive, but still retains the small 11.6" form factor and trackpoint. Yes, there were trackpoint Chomebooks made at one point.

I was able to locate one on Ebay with an early-model Intel Core i3, 4 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD. Not bad for a 10-year old education model laptop.

First Impressions

A couple days later, it came in the mail, and I loaded Xubuntu on it with the I3 window manager, which is a good fit for the little screen. I hadn't looked carefully over the blog post, but man is it thick, and heavy. Compared to my 14" T460 with the 6-cell battery, it weighs 3 lbs 13 oz vs. 4 lbs even for the T460. Yikes! If I'd read more carefully I probably would have stuck with an X230 or maybe the X131e's successor, the trackpoint-less X11e. In addition to the trackpoint, the X131e features the smallest trackpad I've even seen on a laptop, probably because of the need to include the trackpoint buttons above it. Compare to the T460, the dot's on the "i" on the ThinkPad logo light up on both the back of the screen and the palm rest which is a nice touch. Unlike the T46, the logo on the back of the screen is upside down when it's opened - a distinctly pre-Apple design convention. In the top-middle of the lid, it features a big bright green LED that indicates when the WiFi is enabled. Presumably this is a pre-chromebook-era anti-cheating measure. As for the keyboard, it's a little cramped on the right side and lacks the spacing between function key groups that the T460 has. The feel is pretty good though, and there's no noticeable flex(unlike the x11e that came after it) so there's an upside to the heft.

Running Linux

Xubuntu installed without much difficulty. After getting set up, I put on I3 WM and some supporting software:

qutebrowser

sxiv

feh

zathura

nnn

htop

ncdu

fish

tmux

Sleep works well, and despite the age of the laptop, the battery health is decent.

Two Months In

The heft of the laptop hasn't proved to be a big issue as I stick to it's big-brother T460 with nifty dual batteries for travel. The small footprint is nice as I can accomodate it on my work-frome-home desk so I can check chat/whatever while working. The wimpy CPU manages to hold up to YouTube, but it bogs down when I start up the official Discord Electron-based app. There's a cross-platform third-part client called Ripcord that's supposed to be quite a bit faster, but it comes with the threat of a perma-ban for violating Discord's ToS. If people are looking for a reason to use IRC/Matrix instead, there it is. Kind of a shame because I actually like Discord otherwise.