 Welcome to another episode of me complaining about technology that I don't like. In this episode, I have some computers here. You'll see that on the right, so okay, here's what I'm going to do this video on. This is my ThinkPad, my ThinkPad X220. Now if you're on the internet and you're using computers and you claim to be a pro, you got to use a ThinkPad. It's almost a meme, but in this video I'm going to explain why it's not just a meme. There are reasons to use one of these. Not just a ThinkPad, but specifically an older one, although the new ones are sort of okay. Here we have a better computer. If you look at the specs, this computer is better. This is an HP Probook 450G6. I don't know if anyone cares about any of those numbers, but that's what it is. I got this from work. This is my work-issued computer, and it is such an annoyance for many different reasons. I want to talk about some reasons why. Some of these are going to be specific to just Linux users, but let's start by flipping these things over. There's my name. First off, one thing I wanted to do is, I like using Linux, of course, and I usually like ... I don't want to ... There's probably some rule about me deleting the operating system in this machine, so I didn't do it, but I did want to open it up and replace the hard drive. Well, I think the main hard drive is actually on M-SATA, so I wanted to put one of my solid state drives in here, so I could run Linux on it and I could boot from that. You might think that that's a simple thing to do, but it isn't. It would be a simple thing to do on this ThinkPad. What I would do is, there's a little screw here. This little thing comes off. You put the hard drive in, you replace whatever's in there before, and that's all you have to do. You now have a hard drive in this computer. In order to do it on this one, you've got to get this screw, this screw, this screw, this screw, that typical stuff. You've got to take the whole panel off, and then if you open this up, I'm not going to do it now because it's such a pain, but I'll describe how it is. There's a battery here. The hard drive is supposed to go here. In order to get the hard drive out, I think you have to actually remove the battery too, which is very delicate, of course. You've got to be careful with everything. Of course, the annoying thing ... One of the annoying things about this is ... Well, one of the good things about a ThinkPad, to take out a battery, you basically just unhook it here. I can't really do it with one hand because I'm holding the camera with the other, but you nearly can do it with one hand. The battery is right here, and there are a couple advantages to that. I want you to think about the advantages of having a battery. You can just pull off. It just has a couple of protective latches on it. Sometimes, every once in a while, something that happens is you have static problems. Your computer ... It has a static ... There's something electrical. A lot of times, this happens in the winter, and your computer will not boot or shut down properly. An easy way to fix that on a computer like this is you just pull out the battery. It's the same way in cell phones. It used to be you could easily take out a cell phone battery, but now basically to annoy you and to get you to have to fix things more often or go into the store to fix things, they make it more difficult to do that. The same things here are battery. This is supposed ... The rationalization for this is, oh, look how sleek this is. Look how nasty this is. Look at all these scary ports and stuff like that. But in reality, taking out the battery is a nice and simple thing here. It's a difficult thing here. In order to take ... Here's the catch 22 of a computer like this. In order to get to the battery, you have to open it up. You have to have the motherboard all in front of you. What happens if it is ... You get this case off and you're looking at the battery. You want to take it out. There's a winner and there's static all over the place. You go to reach to take it out and static goes between your hand and the motherboard. Well, game over, man. Here you never have this problem. Before you open up anything, you can easily take the battery off. There's no problem whatsoever. Anyway, so you have to do that. You have to be careful about static. You have to remove the battery. Then you can get to the hard drive. That's what I did. I put the hard drive in and it wasn't too difficult. It's in there now. It wasn't too difficult after I did all that other junk. Of course, the problems do not in there, obviously. One other thing. A couple of months ago, or I guess maybe a year or so ago, I did a video on installing Arch Linux. One thing I said in that video that caused some controversy is that I said that I'm very much against UEFI ... I'm not really against it. If I have the choice, I will not use UEFI. I will use traditional booting methods to boot into Linux. The reason ... A lot of people are like, oh, well, UEFI is the new thing. Why don't you just use that? Why do you want to be an old boomer and use the old way of booting? Because there are advantages to UEFI. The annoying thing about it is that with the rise of UEFI, you have this stuff like secure boot and all these other things that basically amount to making it difficult for you to boot into Linux. Again, the rationalization is, oh, we're just making it more secure for normies out there who might plug drives in their computer that can be booted from, and then you could exploit them in some way. First off, I don't think that ever really happened that often. It'd be hard to fool someone with a trick like that. Even if that's the case, secure boot, well, once I finally got, of course, my operating system in here, in order ... or my hard drive in here, in order to boot into the operating system was a huge pain. These new computers that have UEFI and might not even have traditional BIOS, they might make it really hard to get traditional BIOS. It basically ... You have to go through all these settings. Sometimes you cannot do it if your BIOS is locked. I almost expected this to be that way because this is issued by my employer. Thankfully, my employer, they're all a bunch of boomers, so they don't exactly know how to lock all that stuff down. But it can be done with UEFI, can't really be done with traditional BIOS. That's one of the reasons I really hate UEFI. Yes, there are advantages. Yes, people in the comments will tell me the advantages. I know them, but I will just say using Linux with UEFI is such a pain. UEFI is designed to be that way. That's the way I do not like ... That's the thing I do not like about it. Okay, so I had to deal with that, then I boot everything, and the Linux installation went very cleanly. Here it is, everything's installed. I have larbs running and stuff like that, but there's one thing that did not work. Now, as I was installing this, you'll see I have an ethernet cord and plugged up to my router. That's why I'm in this puny little room I have. This is actually where I keep my old kids' stuff. There's an old paper mache continent imaginary land I made when I was a kid. This is where I keep a bunch of old memorabilia, and I have my phone. Anyway, so I brought it in here to have it connected to the ethernet just to make it easier. But I realized that yet another thing about annoying modern computers is that a lot of Wi-Fi adapters are, of course, proprietary now. Now, in an old computer like this, no one had the funny idea. Basically, any old machine, you're going to get your Wi-Fi working, unless you're using one of those Linux distributions. I mean, all of them are going to work basically out of the box, unless it's one of those old Linux, or not old Linux distributions, but one of the ones that's all free software. That's the only thing you have to worry about, and if you're using a distribution like that, you already know how to deal with that. You know what you're getting into. In any other Linux install, you install it on this X220, or over here I have my X60, which is even earlier. You install Linux on this, everything is going to work out of the box. But now that we have all these proprietary, this proprietary firmware with Wi-Fi devices and stuff like that, getting the Wi-Fi to work on this, I still actually have not figured this out. Here's the annoyance. Now this isn't entirely, well, yes, it is entirely their problem, but I was trying to compile the, in the AUR, there's a package that's supposed to fix it and it's out of date, and so now I have to do this stuff manually. It's a big pain. But this is a pain that I should not have to be putting up with. And here's the thing, if you're a new user to Linux, what happens is you run into a problem like this and you say, Linux is stupid. This also happens with people who use like NVIDIA drivers, okay? But the problem ultimately is not about Linux. It's about the fact that people nowadays, basically in order to lock people in, will write this proprietary firmware. NVIDIA has special relationships with Microsoft or something like that, and they will basically make it so it's impossible to, or at least very difficult for people to use this kind of stuff on Linux or something else. The thing about the Linux kernel, like in terms of one of the weirdest questions you get from like new users to Linux is they'll ask you like, how do you install drivers? Well, 99 times out of 100, on Linux there are no drivers, or well there are basically, but they're already in the Linux kernel. You don't have to worry, it's always gonna work, especially if you have a computer like this. But if you have one of the things that usually go wrong, NVIDIA drivers and Wi-Fi, but only on these modern computers. And when I say modern, I mean things that came out in the past couple of years. Now this computer here, this X220, this I wanna say came out in maybe 2012 or something like that, and computers of this period usually work pretty well. Again, this is before UEFI was super, I don't know if UEFI didn't exist or what, but it was before it was as prevalent as it is today. Nowadays, I feel like it's universal I think, I'm not actually exactly sure, because I so rarely have computers like this, I can't even tell you. But this is the kind of frustration about it. And again, when you run into problems like this, if you're a newbie Linux user, when you run into them, they are automatically, you will interpret that as being the fault of Linux. So this is why people use ThinkPads in Linux. It's not actually because there's anything fantastic about ThinkPads and yes, there are things, people love the old keyboards, they are totally different, it's a pain to type on this garbage. I don't know why people have keyboards like that, but this is an aesthetic choice. Most people will prefer keyboards like this, they might look nastier. And of course this thing here, TrackPoint will change your life. If you have one of these and you're not using them, use it, it will literally change your life. I don't know how to, you will never use this thing. I actually have this thing unplugged, I never use it. So I only use the TrackPoint. But this is why people use ThinkPads. And this is why ThinkPads are not a meme. They are, I mean, just look at the thing, it's a box, it's ugly, okay? If you're a normie, girls do not like computers that look like this. And that's a good sign because this is not about looking beautiful, it's about functionality. Everything, again, the hard drive just one screw out, everything, once you open this stuff up, everything basically clicks out. And here you open it up, everything is right on top of everything. This thing has more room. It should be the thing that has more breathing room, but this is a much more, if you actually open it up, it's easier to use. All right, so this is why, this is the thing I'm complaining about in this video. So anyway, hopefully that made some things clear as why, again, I'm pretending this is an educational video. It's really just I'm mad at this stupid computer and all computers nowadays. This is why I don't use a computer that was made a couple of years ago. I think the sweet spot, again, is ThinkPad X220, that's a really common one. A lot of times people have ones a little before or a little after, but computers like this, they are fast enough to do everything you do unless you're just doing hardcore video rendering. I mean, it can do that as well. It'll just take a little more time. Now even, I will say, even computers like this, this is the X60. This can only take 32-bit operating systems. This is much slower, but if you're running Linux on it and you have a lightweight Linux distribution, this is fine for that as well. In fact, if you can actually feel the difference between this and that, like this thing is sturdy, like you could literally knock someone out by just plopping them on the head with this thing. This thing is a fantastic computer. It is not, but this is more the X60, these older ones, these are more meme computers, to be honest. I would not recommend this to a normal person. It's things like the X220, the X230, maybe even the X200, which is a little slower, but still good, not really that much slower than this. I would recommend these for normal people as well. They'll go on eBay for $150, maybe $200, sometimes less than 100. I think they used to be less than 100 and then I started meming them real hard and I feel like I actually increased the price. So get them now before they get more expensive. Anyway, that's it. I'm gonna figure out the wifi on this. By the way, if you know, again, this is a HP Probook 450G6. If you know how to get wifi working on Arch Linux, you go ahead and tell me, cause save me some work. Anyway, that's it. I'll see you guys next time.