I'm thinking of buy a Lenovo Thinkpad X230 for $225. I own a copy of Linux in a Nutshell 5th ed. which I bought for 25 cents at a goodwill. Is there any advice or suggestions someone can give me before I pull the trigger? I am a beginner in linux, although I did get mint running on an old laptop a few years back.
edit: I ended up buying a Thinkpad x250. I am excited.
If your primary goal is to learn Linux, but actually using it is secondary, I would suggest reading the ArchWiki instead of your book. ArchWiki is essentially documentation for a DIY Linux distro called Arch Linux. It's well-structured, thorough and up-to-date. There's pretty much nothing like it for the other distros. It exists out of necessity, because in order to use Arch you are expected to understand how things fit together in your Linux install, and ArchWiki explains all of that.
Even just to install Arch, you need to learn and manually perform steps that distro installers do under the hood while showing you a progress bar and a banner gallery. But of course, the wiki will guide you every step of the way.
There's also notes on tweaks and troubleshooting for different hardware, including your X250.
So before you roll a Kubuntu or whatever on your new laptop and end up with a black box, consider Arch.
I just spent an hour on the arch Linux wiki; I also watched part of a YouTube video tutorial. I can't really make heads or tails of it. I'm going to try Fedora and learn more about Linux and the command line. Maybe down the road I'll try Arch. Thank you for the input.
For sure. Arch would be a bottom-up approach to learning, while a preconfigured distro is top-down, sort of. Good luck in any case.