Makes sense. I was thrown off by the fact that you described it as “a refurb” and assumed you had bought something refurbished.

Side question: you bought a laptop but don’t know what specs it has? How did that happen?

That’s good to know. Thanks!

Yeah, that’s fair. It definitely depends on the model and the product tier. All the manufacturers, even Lenovo’s lower end/consumer models, can have poor build quality on some models, so I would avoid those. Your average mid-tier and up business laptop will probably hold up just fine, though.

At some level it may also be luck of the draw, even if build quality will help the odds. Sometimes even a high-end laptop can get dropped once at the wrong angle and stop working, and yet I have seen beat-up chromebooks which looked like they came from a warzone and yet somehow still run.

Sure, there is certainly nothing wrong with a T480, and if you can find them at a reasonable price then go for it. That said, I would not exclude any other brands out of hand if you can find a good deal on, say, a 3-5 year old business laptop from the likes of Dell or HP. For all the durability of a T480, bear in mind that it will already be ~8 years old when you get it.

I think historically Linux users had to be a bit more particular about laptop models due to spotty driver support on laptop hardware, hence the love for Thinkpads which had good Linux compatibility, but these days I think the only real compatibility concerns are around fingerprint sensors with proprietary drivers and the occasional oddball wifi chip.

Upgrading BIOS is also a concern as @PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world mentioned, but in some cases I have used a bootable Windows USB drive to run the .exe-based FW upgrades on my HP laptop, for example.

I don’t think you need to limit yourself to a Thinkpad specifically. Linux should work on almost any laptop these days. I would look around for secondhand business laptops. They tend to be reasonably priced and often gently used when they are coming from business environments.