I am coming up on the eight year anniversary of my first-ever used Thinkpad purchase. What makes this so special? Well I guess there's a number of reasons why I'm talking about this huge brick yet again, and what brings me to the point of this post.
Years back, when I first started accumulating disposable income, I wanted to buy a piece of hardware separate from my desktop system. I'm not always at home, and sometimes I'm out and about or at work, a laptop would make sense. I am aware of the fandom surrounding the Thinkpad family of devices, having spent time on places like ThinkWiki. I spent time scouring eBay for a moderately priced device, until I settled on the Thinkpad T440.
Now, is there some level of craziness to buying a piece of hardware this old? Probably. The T440 is a 2013-era laptop system, doesn't come with a whole lot of frills, and certainly doesn't do anything terribly exciting. But, it has been a laptop home of mine for a number of years, a reliable companion. Cafe dates, low-poly or emulated gaming, coding, experimenting with Linux systems, mostly anything I've learned in the last almost-decade I can attribute this laptop to being part of that.
But, perhaps this might be the end of the road for the T440.
Problems
The T440 has been a hardware piece I've been running Guix on for a while. Guix is not the easiest thing to work with, but I got a configuration working and had a pretty happy environment mostly stable and working with Steam. The disk itself had seen quite a number of distros on it over the years, and Guix I felt was the comfortable OS for the rest of its days.
One day, I turned it on, and to my surprise, the Guix system would no longer boot.
In the moment of the computer I had seemingly turned on last month and was using perfectly fine, something was up. Now in all my years of working on computers, maybe my brain didn't quite want to process it, but the CMOS battery warning should have been an obvious one.
The BIOS boot settings were all reset to a factory default, meaning my file partitions EFI files were not being recognized. I ran a live Linux distro to make sure it wasn't a faulty SSD or what have you, since I have quite literally never replaced the SSD this thing came with. It could have been an SSD failure and I wouldn't really know how to recognize it other than connecting it to my main PC.
I ordered a replacement CMOS battery, swapped it in, installed a new OS just to be safe, and I was back in order. I may have to rebuild my Guix OS on it on a different day, but the fear of losing the computer entirely got me thinking, perhaps it was time to retire it as my main device. I wasn't bringing it with me on my trains anymore since it is so particularly heavy and bulky. It's been a number of years, maybe it was time to look for something new.
Replacement
I started a search to find a modest replacement. My life is a little different than what it was eight years ago, and technology has changed a modest amount. We have USB-C charging ports now for mostly everything, bigger space for drives, more RAM, and certainly better screens. The T440 still has it's stock LCD screen because I never wanted to do screen replacement surgery on it. It only has 8GB of RAM, which I was lucky to get for the price since higher RAM models are more rare back then. The battery life isn't totally awesome anymore either.
That being said, new hardware in 2026 is awful. It's all terrible. We have dedicated Copilot AI buttons that can't be re-programmed. RAM in most 2026 models is expected to shrink due to the RAM shortages we're currently experiencing. Not to mention the retail value of mostly all new computers has exploded. Anything that can have a high amount of memory would be overpriced because it's now an "AI developer workstation" or some nonsense, and anything lower than 8GB is unusable because Windows 11 eats up 60% of your RAM doing nothing.
Anyone who spends some time around me knows I try to avoid buying anything on release. I don't buy new smartphones day one, and my phone is currently close to being three years old with only two years left of upstream security support from Google. So a reasonable question to ask: is buying new practical anymore?
Dumpster Diving
I don't want to spend a whole lot of time talking about why I feel computers are in a very strange spot with regards to how major players like Microsoft can choose to make redundant millions of computers at the snap of a finger. My personal belief is that computers can be used and fixed to be made to last longer, and I want to continue sticking to that principle moving forward through 2026. Let's talk about what I'm looking for.
I don't think there's a perfect magic formula one could follow to figure out the hardware requirements you'd need to get by. For the most part, I want something a little bit smaller and a little bit better than what I purchased in 2018. I bought a five-year old device back in 2018, so maybe I could buy a five-year old device now.
By process of elimination, pretty much anything made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and ASUS I am immediately disregarding. I have seen and experienced far too many laptops by all of the above, and I'm not happy with any of them anymore. That leaves me with little room to work with, such as Lenovo being one of the few remaining brands.
Lenovo does have potential to be something good. But, I'm not sure if I want to simply buy yet another Thinkpad experience. I have been interested in the X1 Carbon family of Thinkpads for a while, notably a brand of laptops that only came out after I bought my T440 in 2018. They're light-weight, performant, and very popular despite being points of contention in the Thinkpad community.
Sadly, I think this is a time where I'd like to skip on the Thinkpad. My reasoning breaks down into a few points.
- Form factor - do I want another boring laptop?
- Charging - how many wires do I need to lug with me?
- Battery life - is the battery life going to be reasonably decent?
- Weight - how much weight would it add to my work bag?
Now I have no doubts about battery life and charging, but weight and form factor leave me skeptical. Do I want yet another clam-fold plastic chassis laptop in my bag? Something about it seems so mundane. I don't want to keep experiencing the same hardware story each time I buy a piece of hardware, it doesn't really lead to new use-cases of experiences in my opinion. Like yes I can carry a laptop everywhere I go, but that doesn't feel particularly very engaging for me.
Reflecting on the other devices I've used throughout my life, I started thinking about the Microsoft Surfaces again.
Surface
Based on the post title, this really shouldn't be a surprise. The Microsoft Surface is a tablet-like computing device geared for business users or people who are really mobile. It first came out when Windows 8 was released, and by some stretch of the imagination, I feel as if we simply weren't ready for what Windows 8 was trying to bring us.
What made them attractive is the direct line from hardware manufacturer to OS provider: Microsoft. No more botched updates from Dell or IBM, the tech blame falls exactly on one gigantic corporation. And of course when these things were first released, Microsoft wanted them in sight of as many people as possible with as much anti-Apple sentiment possible.
There is no specialized OS, it is simply a Windows computer. It's a touch screen, it has a foldable keyboard, it's extremely light-weight, and all that makes it hyper-mobile for the right people. Business-types love the high-tech iPad form factor, creatives get a screen drawing tablet, students get a tiny little thing that they can throw into any backpack.
These devices first originated in 2012, and while I was vaguely interested back then, that opinion quickly changed once I actually had one in my possession.
In 2017, I went to Atlantic City over in New Jersey. I took with me on that trip a Surface 3, the third iteration in the Surface hardware. Why did I have one? It was given to me because a family member simply didn't care for it anymore and got a Surface Book some time later.
I flashed it with Linux Mint at the time, and the experience was... Simply unusable. Wireless networking was hit or miss, graphics and CPU power was not quite there, and I struggled to make it a good daily driver.
Looking back, what went wrong? The Surface 3 utilizes an Intel Atom CPU, which are notably terrible CPUs for anything that isn't a Chromebook. There are most likely other reasons why the hardware wasn't as well supported either like mainline kernel support, but it didn't inspire confidence as making it a daily Linux computer.
Back then, they were horribly overpriced, probably very slow, and had little real-world functionality other than a point-of-sale device. Having experienced this Surface back in 2017, getting the Thinkpad a year later was a boon.
Kernel
Coming back to the hardware acquisition search, I stumbled across a strange video as I was trying to peak my curiosity. How do Surfaces handle Linux in 2026? Thankfully, somebody answered that question by installing Linux on a ton of different Surface models.
The process is as straight-forward as it can be: disable Secure Boot, disable the Windows boot manager, and boot into a live Linux ISO and install. This was a similar process in 2017, and it's largely unchanged. However, this video inspired new-found confidence in the Surfaces I didn't have years ago.
An alternative kernel called linux-surface was born and supported a wide array of different Surface devices through community work. For the most part, everything looked relatively stable, and using this would help me pick a device from the Surface family. With nothing else to go on other than a single GitHub project and a YouTube video, could I make this work and have it become my next travel companion?
Shopping
Browsing through eBay is usually an experience. It's never really known if something will work when you receive it, then you have to go through a two-plus week process to even get refunded by eBay and do the return steps.
I noted earlier that my rule of thumb is picking something a little around five years of age to match my T440 age gap back then. I also want to keep the price fairly low as well, at least not more expensive than what I originally paid for the T440, hence the image at the top. This leaves me with a few options.
The Surface Pro 8 is a desirable pick because of it's 11th generation Intel hardware and reasonable specs on RAM and space. It had released around 2021, fits my five-year age gap estimate, and comes with pretty much everything I would need to get started. The only downside is it's price, which was a little outrageous.
By using eBay's "sold items" filter, the Surface Pro 8s have been selling anywhere from $400 to $700 USD, which is really strange. Are people really buying five-year old hardware for that price? That seems a little ridiculous to me. So I looked a little lower, at the Surface Pro 7 instead.
The Surface Pro 7 rocks Intel 10th generation CPUs, which is a few notches above good enough for TPM 2.0, not that I care about that. It sells anywhere from $200 to $300, which I felt was an agreeable price for what it came with. For only being about two years older, it's not that bad. I found a listing for roughly $200, and it comes with an i7, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.
After all this time spent analyzing and trying to find the perfect device, I added the Surface Pro 7 to my cart and proceeded to checkout.
Setting Up
A box arrived on my doorstep, and wow, this box weighs nothing at all! I think the box weighed a total of 3lbs when I brought it in. The purchase did not come with a charger, granted who knows how much that would add, but this box was very light.
It came very late in the evening, so I turned it on for a brief moment and fiddled with the supposed window scrobbling problem the listing said it had. Turns out, a laggy window drag in Windows isn't really a hardware or software problem, it's really a Windows 11 problem. I felt fairly confident that this could run Linux with close to zero issues.
The next morning, I hopped on my train geared with the Surface Pro 7 (SP7 here on out) and a flash drive loaded with EndeavourOS. After having sat down, I turned it on, popped into the boot configuration, turned off secure boot and Windows boot manager, and logged into EndeavourOS, and it worked perfectly fine. Then, I started the install, and a little later, I had a clean Linux machine all set up on the train. Perhaps someone behind me watching the entire process had many questions about what they were watching with a giant red lock appearing over the boot screen.
With no internet for the rest of the day, I had to wait until I got home to install the linux-surface kernel. With only base desktop packages installed, it's not like I could do much other than write code via nano or what have you. The kernel install should fix the touch screen at least, although the web camera is currently unsupported, and that is totally fine with me.
After getting home to a plain wifi network, I installed linux-surface per their instructions and set it as my default kernel in the systemd boot configuration. Upon booting into the new kernel, I was playing around with the power button to see the different uses of suspend/hibernate modes available, and... Well after toying around I did hit a kernel panic.
That kernel panic may have just been some rotten luck; I couldn't capture it, otherwise I would have passed it along to the linux-surface project. I need to get better at capturing those problems if I want to be of any use, but that kernel panic never came back after days of use later. That being said, I got things like Python and Rust installed, and now it's basically a normal developer laptop.
Synchronizing
While I primarily operate off my desktop, adding another mobile device with virtually zero internet access most of the day makes it difficult to keep it up-to-date with random things I work on. Let's say I write code on the Surface during my train rides, I explicitly have to remember to upload it once I get home. That's fine, so long as I remember to push to a Git repository and commit my code. But what about other files?
If I want to do a drawing, art files such as Krita are binary, and not terribly suitable for Git differential algorithms. It would not be best to store all my artwork as a Git repo. The cleaner solution is to simply use a network server like a Samba share. However, this isn't a totally automated process. Using a network automatically-mounted share instead would let you treat a network host like a file system instead letting the kernel do normal read/write IO, but just over the network wire instead. But this doesn't technically solve the synchronized issue, just where the data is stored.
What I've found instead is that with rsync, you can create a shell command that lets you push files to a remote host. Punching in a shell function command to sync your computer isn't the nicest option, but there are ways to jerry-rig it such that it can work if you are connected to a network and only execute that maybe say once a day or so. It doesn't even have to be a bi-directional sync if you don't want that either; maybe you only care about a one-way backup option, then rsync is great.
Stealing the name of Dropbox here, but treat it as something similar.
rsync -avr ~/dropbox remotehost:~/dropbox
Doing that pushes files from your ~/dropbox folder and puts it on a remote host on your network in the same name. Reverse the arguments, and you can update your local device with files from the remote host. Want to share books or PDFs or documents you're working on with LibreOffice? Now you can use your network server as a good place to share files. If the remote host has Samba configured, you can access the files via Samba as well.
Bluetooth
The device does technically have Bluetooth on-board, so it can connect to a variety of peripherals. Perfect for those with wireless earbuds and the like, but one thing I never tried using Bluetooth for was file share.
Simply put, if I take a photo on my phone of a certain level of fog of Manhattan one day and I want to edit it on the go, I can certainly connect a USB-C cable to my phone. But I do not want to have to do that; Bluetooth should let me be able to warp files back and forth. My friend sends me a resume to look at and fix, it might be better off fixed while I'm on my Surface instead of fat-thumbing around on whatever editor I have on my phone.
Hotspotting
Before you ask: "can you hotspot?" because I frequently thought of that. There is absolutely every reality where I could use my phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot on my commutes and at least attempt to sync any work I have to an online server. I could easily use OpenCloud and do work that way touching my own private hardware at home.
Hotspotting is usually an on-and-off battle of cellular providers. And to my knowledge, sometimes hotspotting is not always free. However, it does appear that I can use hotspotting on my current plan. But I fear it's a step that may lead to accidental data over-usage on my plan. Not only would it lead to a small increase in WiFi traffic on my Surface, it would also add some strain to my phone's battery as well.
I generally need my phone all day for communication, train tickets, credit cards and all other sorts of things, so using hotspot is at best a small risk for when I want to do some synchronized work on the go. I've yet to really give hotspotting a try since the winter season for commuting has been... Interesting to say the least.
Pics
Nothing much else to talk about other than some action shots of it in the wild.
{{ img(src="coding.jpg" desc="What else do you do on a train with no internet and only left to your thoughts? You start coding up silly things like fraction-based math in Rust.") }}
{{ img(src="master_duel.jpg" desc="I installed Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel and decided to see how the touch screen felt. You could get used to playing like this. Granted, you can already do this with mobile devices since it's also on iOS and Android. Swordsoul Tenyi is best deck.") }}
{{ img(src="factorio.jpg" desc="You can very much play Factorio on it. Though I imagine a very large factory will very quickly drain your battery dry.") }}
Thoughts
This was a long and tedious process of trying to find something usable. I have a lot of fond memories of my very first Thinkpad, but I always knew it was going to get aged out in the end. Laptops were not meant to be upgraded (let us ignore Framework in this argument).
Key points that I like about the Surface Pro 7.
- Light-weight - it clocks in around 2.5lbs, still much lighter than other alternatives I've seen
- Battery life - can easily last the whole day if using a battery saver mode
x86_64- none of that Snapdragonaarch64stuff in newer models (see further)- USB-C - another device that easily integrates with my other USB-C charging methods
- Smallness - it's a comfortable size, not quite a laptop, not quite an iPad either
- Bed time - since it's a tablet, it's easy to relax in bed with and simple to put away
Things I may not like or be a total fan of just yet:
- Keyboard - the Surface keyboards have always felt a little weak, feels as if it could be the first to break
- High DPI - I can't count out the extra pixels as being a plus, but I will have to use scaling to bring up the pictures to usable viewing resolutions. I can't help but feel like excess pixels leads to worse battery life, but there's not much I can do about that now
- Suspend/Hibernate - occasionally the suspend fails, and the login becomes unresponsive? Nothing a reboot can't fix, but I'm not an expert on this yet
Things I'm excited to try out:
- Mapping software - downloading an offline copy of something like OpenStreetMap would make it handy for getting around in a pinch
- Drawing - perhaps with Krita or Heavypaint it will be another outlet for sketching and painting
- Gaming - it could do with an honorary Half-Life playthrough
- Coding - another battery-powered device gives reason to want to write more battery-efficient software
I think the most fun part about these new hardware sprints is that you find all sorts of new use-cases you would never likely have expected. Sure I bought it mostly for the trains, long commutes and mostly just to lighten up my bag, but it's become also a new device for being on my couch and multitasking between the TV. I can bring it to bed and finish up a line of code or two. I can bring it to lunch with me if I want to share something I've worked on with friends.
These are the tech upgrades that I think really impact every-day life. Getting smaller computers, simpler computers, or even more mobile versions of Linux is frankly an awesome thing to behold. This Surface Pro 7 is basically 7 years old, but the inspiration and fun it brings is fresh and exciting to have.
Thanks for reading! This one took some weeks to get done just so I could test the Surface. Now onto the next project.
Addendum: Snapdragon
Snapdragon CPUs, the things that drive most of the planet's Android devices, are largely not that compatible with the rest of the technological world. The makers of Snapdragon Qualcomm have done a pretty okay-ish job of getting most things to work, but Snapdragon-based computers are only very recently new to the world with the introduction of Windows for Arm.
Arm-based CPUs using aarch64 aren't terribly compatible with many things like Steam, meaning if you bought a Surface with a Snapdragon chip, chances are you'll likely not be able to play any games with your friends in a meaningful capacity. Games are largely only ever compiled for x86 or amd64 targets, hence the importance of x86_64 Linux for me personally.
If you have a game that was compiled for a different CPU architecture, then you would effectively need a translation layer to convert the instructions that aren't supported into ones that are. This is not a simple 1:1 ratio of instructions, as CPUs are different for what opcodes they have or sizing of bytes and integers. This is solved by using a very recent Windows Prism emulator. However, on Linux platforms this problem isn't entirely solved.
Until very recently, there were only a few options: use something like Box64, or drop down to QEMU. Box64 seems alright, but it's not quite on the same level as Wine and Proton. However, now we have a new tool available called FEX, introduced by Valve and specifically crafted for the Steam Frame that is yet to be released.
Since this is all highly experimental still, I wouldn't call it quite battle-ready for my needs. By design, Arm chips, and soon to be hopefully replaced by RISC-V, are better for energy efficiency and leave behind a lot of the old x86_64 crud designs that prop up much of the chip marketplace. Arm has powered much of the world's devices for this long, I can imagine Arm and RISC-V being the future not too far away. At one point, having a phone would be near-equivalent to having a real desktop PC. Apple has embraced Arm with its M1 chips and is continuing work there as well.
So if you were interested in a Surface with a Snapdragon chip, maybe wait a bit before its considered usable in Linux. If you wanted an Arm-based Linux, consider Raspberry Pi instead!