Can anyone recommend a lightweight, stable distro for a thinkpad?

With 8 GB of RAM and 5500 CPU passmark points, that's a good laptop for Linux Mint. Download their "edge" version of Mint, so you get the latest kernel (so it has more chances of supporting 100% that laptop).

ITT: Every distro

I use Debian stable on mine. I got 16gb of ram but tbh it’s never gone above six in real use, even with a windows vm running.

E: old thinkpad gang input: take the time to reapply thermal grease to the cpu at some point. It makes a huge difference.

Older Thinkpads are very well supported by pretty much everything, so it might be helpful to know more about your experience and what you’ve liked or not liked, and what you intend to run on it.

Linux Mint or Fedora aren’t bad options, Fedora will require a larger version upgrade at least yearly.

I think what matters most in your case is the desktop environment, not the distro. I would suggest something lightweight and fast such as Xfce with the distribution of your choice. Gnome and KDE tend to use (a lot) more resources than Xfce. I personally use Debian stable with Xfce on all my machines (which includes a Thinkpad x220), but the Xfce default settings are not ideal on Debian so you will need to fiddle with them (it can all be done easily with the GUI, but it isn't the most user friendly experience at first). If you want something that looks good outside the box that resembles Windows I would suggest Linux Mint Xfce Edition, very straightforward and easy to use with good looking defaults !

Debian. Hard to get more stable (to a fault, even) than Debian.

You can't go wrong with Debian or Fedora.

SLACKWARE!!!!

I agree with other users recommending Mint

Mint works well on my Thinkpads

Debian Stable or Testing. Runs on anything, and Stable - especially - will not let you down. Ubintu, Elementary and dozens of others are downstream of Debian. Bookworm is a great experience, so why not go to the source?

"Testing" is described as containing packages that are still in the queue to be accepted into Stable.

"Unstable" branch is all the newest stuff, whether it works or not.

If you're in school for anything computer-related, once you've settled on a distro, you could also start playing with Gentoo.

I use Linux Mint and currently Fedora on my Thinkpad.

Will echo the recommendations of debian or mint. I have mint on my 13 year old rog laptop, it's my lab computer and runs klipper for one of my printers, pretty much always up, very rarely reboots. Debian is what I run on my 4 year old zenbook s, pretty much perfect for my uses, it's what I cart around for light/mobile work and I swear it actually has better battery life than it did running windows.

Any distro should be fairly stable and supported on an older Thinkpad.

I’m currently using Debian stable on my X220 and it’s rock solid.

At this point in my life I would use Fedora Budgie/Xfce/lxde for a lightweight distro. Atomic or not. Lately I've been into atomic, but there are some scenarios and software I use that do not play well with the immutable OS.

Debian or OpenSUSE. Can't go wrong.

I think Debian unstable works great on laptops, and it's hard to beat for stability.

If you need to ask for a distro the answer is Mint, if you didn't need to ask the answer might be different, but then you wouldn't be asking.

Mint. LMDE.

Been rocking Debian on my 30 series.

First you need to explain what you want by lightweight. RAM, Disk, GPU, Pre installed packages? Features?

Fedora runs like a champ on em

Personally, I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on similar hardware.

I used antix for my laptop. Its the most lightweight. I also used Debian on it. Mine is also lenovo. If you want real lightweight use antix I guess.

I think it'd be helpful to understand why you want a lightweight distro. I'm running Linux Mint (Cinnamon) on a x201 (~13 years old) and am happy with it's performance. I doubt you're going to have any issues with any distro with your laptop (as others have pointed out, mainstream Thinkpads are well supported by Linux).

I know I have friends who run beasts of machines but refuse to "waste" resources on niceties like animations and whatnot. If you're into that, I assume you want to optimize and tinker, that's different that lightweight.

Mint is always a good point to start when in doubt. Ubuntu is also solid and has lots of documents online.

Last time I was looking for lightweight distros, I found antix & MX. Both are nice, lightweight debian daughters.

That was over 10 years ago. Still inclined to use them for distros to give to people wanting to exit Windows, though all the voices for Mint make me want to check it out, too.

I run LMDE 6 on my Thinkpad. Takes a bit of initial TLC to get tuned, but it's rock stable.

Cinnamon is a really stable DE, I've had almost zero issues ever with it. It's a little plain, but not ugly, and you can add themes if you really want to pretty it up.

I have been using a t450 for the past 5 years as my only pc. For about 4 years I used Arch without any major issues, but my “optimizations” became too much to maintan. For the past year I’ve been using Kinoite and it’s brilliant.

Everything runs good enough out of the box and in my daily use I haven’t noticed that I’m running a 9 year old machine. I even play games that should have no business running on that crusty old thing. Also, the stability is divine.

Anything in the fedora stable will work great (redhat literally gave out T480s to their devs) I recommend whatever ublue variant floats your boat., atomic updates baby. If you're smart you'll get some PTM7950 and never need to repaste.

Would go with Fedora or Opensuse if you want to have something that just works. Try endevouros or Arch if you wanna thinker/play around with your os

Nixos

I run PopOS on my T450s. Runs like a dream, but probably not considered 'lightweight .

Not a popular idea but I've been using chrome os flex and it has been awesome.

mint is nice but fedora KDE runs also pretty well on my thinkpad x1 yoga gen3

I have LMDE on my T580.

You can run any distro you like on it , but peppermint is is my favourite. Everything you need and nothing you don't.

I have a gen 6 x1 carbon which I read is similar. Popos runs a dream on it.

I have a similar ThinkPad, I run Mint with LxQt, though xfce is a good option too

All of them would be fine, also what wireless card and does yours have a gpu. Iirc the 580 had an option for an mx150 so I wouldn't be surprised if the 480 had one.

Intel wireless cards are well supported, others not so much

I'm using Fedora on a second hand x380 Yoga and it works rather nicely.

I have a T560 and i run debian with sway. It serves the dual purpose of getting me more comfortable in the terminal (i even use power shell on my windowa desk top a lot more now), and it runs much better than KDE or gnome did. Im missing some obvious quality of life settings like easily adjusting the power settings (it never sleeps, just turns off the screen and locks). But again, im trying to get more comfortable using the terminal so for me its more of a "take the training wheels off" thing.

Anything with either the Xfce or LXQt desktop environment would be good enough for you. I heard those are pretty lightweight.

LXDE is kinda nice too.

Slackware with it's Xfce session would be pretty good

If you got a Nvidia dGPU I recommend PopOS. It gave me the best energy options and ability to switch between iGPU and dGPU out of the box. It even found new firmware for my T480 and installed it without a hitch.

Kubuntu works well on mine. A friend has Lubuntu on his.

I daily a t480 with Manjaro and absolutely love it. It's real snappy and even the hybrid graphics work flawlessly.

I would put pop os on it

I'm a big fan of Debian stable for school / work laptops. Older packages aren't great, but if you aren't someone who needs the newest libreoffice version or something, it works fine. Updates will basically never break it apart from major releases (which you have a few years before you have to worry about, although you can upgrade sooner).

Arch is you know how to use Arch. If lazy then something like Bhodi or Q4OS. I put the latter on a couple of friend's laptops who recently jumped from Windows. Since it is very Windows-like but it uses less than 400mb of RAM to run on a cold boot.

Ubuntu Budgie