Eleven years later, my Lenovo G50 is still going strong

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Eleven years later, my Lenovo G50 is still going strong

Updated: May 22, 2026

This is going to be a short article. A short happy article. Back in 2015, I purchased one<br>G50 machine, a mid-level laptop, intended purely for (Linux)<br>distro testing purposes. Since, I've used in extensively, with probably at least 100 distros tried. At<br>one point, I even had an eight-boot setup configured on the system. Jolly jolly times. All these<br>adventures are meticulously detailed in my Linux section, so feel free to roam and explore at your<br>leisure.

At some point, the inevitable software bloat made the boot times excessively slow. Three minutes and<br>counting. But then, I decided to remove the crusty and rather snail-paced HDD that came with the box<br>and slot in its place a<br>speedy SSD, and ever since, the laptop has kept going on,<br>most loyally. In this article, I want to briefly cover the last couple of years, the fun and games one<br>can have with old hardware, plus a cautious message for the future. Let's.

Full HD media, virtualization, you name it

This "lowly" box comes with a 2-core, 4-thread i3 processor from 2015. Eleven years. Integrated<br>graphics. A rather okayish 8 GM of RAM, one could say. Despite the specs that seem outdated today, the<br>laptop can still play full HD content without any problem, be it local media in VLC or streaming<br>in Firefox. Things are quite sprightly.

But I decided to make it even more interesting. I set up VirtualBox 7.2 in the resident Kubuntu<br>24.04, and then, I spun up a namesake virtual machine, giving it half the system's CPU and memory<br>resources. And still, things work fine. I turned compositing off, but even with it active, the laptop<br>is no slouch. Hint: compositing is one of them things that you CAN enable or disable in the<br>X11 desktop, not so in Wayland.<br>Funnily enough, my host uses the kernel 6.8, whereas the guest has its HWE stack, which means the brand<br>new and dandy version 6.17. Lovely jubbly. And not only does it not limp, everything works quite all<br>right. Reasonably fast!

Speaking of<br>Kubuntu 26.04, I tried it as the guest operating system, and I<br>didn't get far. I guess there was some problem with the virtualization 3D drivers and Wayland. I also<br>remembered that Kubuntu's installation slides mentioned the ability to use the distro on 7-8-year-old<br>hardware, as if that's an achievement. Probably has to do with whatever arbitrary limitations have been<br>set for old Nvidia drivers and Wayland, because legacy stuff is boring, innit.

But yeah, the machine works superbly. The boot times are around 18-ish seconds total, which ain't<br>bad considering I get similar results on a system four years younger, with a Ryzen 5 processor and<br>NVMe. See my Kubuntu 26.04 review for that, please. And remember, the laptop has a fully removable<br>battery, which you can easily replace, and there's a DVD tray, too. Still works.

Conclusion

Desktop computing peaked - or plateaued - around 2012 or so, even since Intel released and refined<br>its "eye" generation of processors. At that time, it was clearly evident that any future improvements<br>in hardware would not render revolutionary changes like in the decades before. This also meant that you<br>didn't need to rush replacing your systems so quickly anymore, and if you lucked upon a sturdy reliable<br>machine, you were in for a treat. My Lenovo G50 is a good example. Sure, its original operating system<br>was useless, it was riddled with nonsense vendor crapware and alike, and I had lots of issues with<br>Linux early on. But as a piece of kit, as hardware, it endured and proved itself many times over.

When I look at the current compute landscape, it is so obvious that big companies want the end user<br>to keep arbitrarily refreshing their gear all the time, and if they won't do it voluntarily, then there<br>will be software mandates and limits that will force people to buy and use newest and latest models. If<br>you're confused what I'm talking about, it's this whole QR codes, ID verifications, passkeys, and<br>similar nonsense. My Lenovo G50 is a relic from a different, better time. A piece of metal and plastic<br>built to last, and last it does. For its relatively humble price, it has more than justified its value.<br>I hope it will serve me for years to come. On a happy, maybe even nostalgic note, Dedo bids you<br>farewell.

Cheers.

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