Since I graduated from university I've always had a separate machine, usually a laptop, as a linux development machine. Many people use VMs for their linux development and for playing around with new distros, but I've always found that real hardware works better. I'd rather not fiddle with the settings on a VM to make it work well, especially with things like USB passthrough (which I think works better nowadays, but that is beside the point). I just sort of like to have a machine that works independently of my main system that I can't get into trouble on since it is totally sandboxed away. Maybe it makes less sense now but with the price and availability of old laptops these days it's kind of hard to think of a better scheme sometimes.
So what is the best machine to choose? Most linux fans would say a Thinkpad from a few years ago, and I am inclined to agree. Thinkpads (until pretty recently) were built like brick shithouses, and were very easily repairable as well. I remember that my dad always used to have one for work and I always loved the blacked out and industrial look of them. Modern enterprise machines seem flimsy by comparison.
So buy a thinkpad I did, an X230 to be exact. It fit the bill perfectly: super upgradeable, has an expansion bay in the form of an expresscard slot, and since it isn't too modern the price is still pretty low. At least, I thought I was getting an X230, but when the box came to my door I pulled it open with glee only to find... an X230T, the convertible version of the X230. It had the stylus pen and everything! I guess someone else got the short end of this mixup, but I would say I kind of lucked out. These are a bit rarer than the standard X230, and the wacom drivers actually work out of the box in debian, which was incredibly surprising to me, so if I can find a drawing application for debian then I might be able to give it a try. I kind of like it when people put the prices of things online so that when these sites become archival, one can look back on what the price of things was at the time, so here it is: $118.39, shipped to my house.
So of course buying it isnt the whole story, there have to be upgrades. I also got 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SATA SSD for the main drive bay (which is accessible from the outside, unline some machines. I also have other plans, maybe a cellular card? I need to stop coming up with cellular projects but theyre just so damn fun, and the ability to use your machine anywhere is so enticing. Everyone should have a machine like this in their arsenal, if for no other reason than that it's really cool. I am planning to use it for anything I need linux for, but most pressingly for postmarketOS development. Having a real system that is somewhat stable is really good for pmOS development, and it would be a big step up from the old hacktop, which was an old Sony unit that I had Arch on that I bricked trying to update SSL and gave up on. That machine runs windows now for car tuning software. It's a shame to see an old soldier go. 07