So it's been KIND OF A RABBIT HOLE gang. Fell on a thinkpad meme one month ago on tiktok. I was like "damn that's funny". I did not know anything about computers, nor linux, nor privacy, fully using my gmail on every gafam apps imaginable. And here I am now, having gone full degooglelized writing on that t440p I bought for 40 euros that I brought back to life only using locally bought used hardware :D. Took this one cause it yas cheap and saw it was easy to disasemble and because it has a socketed CPU so the right to repair was more accessible in the future. pumped it with a 4810mq and 16 gigs of ram yith a 500gigs SSD. I'm planing to produce on it as a way to prove to myself I can do music on a popato with opensource DAW and plugins. downside is the battery that last 3 hours max, gonna try to cyrberpunk mod it with a 100w powerbank held in place with velcro on the lower topcase yith a USB-C to slim tip cable If I manage to find one. When I'll feel more confortable with a soldering iron I'll look into building a battery inside the CD bay.
Also need to find an azerty kezboard because this one feels great but the german disposition is driving me mad
No clue what's WMs but please do share my guy. My mood disorder monster is begging to be fed
I personally use XMonad, which is a tiling window manager (WM)--others I know from the top of my head are awesomeWM and dwm, though there are many more. their configuration files can be complex (XMonad is written in haskell), but there's a lot of documentation online / configs you can copy and modify. def not a bad thing to stick to KDE / Gnome while you get yourself comfy and only go tiling if that's your preference. c:
WM = window manager. Plasma is KDE's (KDE is a (desktop environment) DE, and has basic tiling baked in and more advanced versions that can be added). Things like Sway are lightweight super configurable tiling WMs / compositors.
OP is right, super rabbit hole, I advise leaving it for later and focusing on getting your workflow / DAW sorted first. KDE or Gnome will work fine, that's actually quite a competent 4 core CPU and plenty of RAM.
I have a similar T440p. Fun upgrades are replacing the clunkpad and that horrible display panel, though you have to consider that against just saving for a T480/580, but they're great to work on, laptop equivalent of Lego (Framework has it beat though).
Framework beats it yeah but they are also sooooo expensive for what they offer fiuuuu. And as much as I encourage more brands to do the same I've seen a lot of ppl complaining about the sturdiness.