Updated: March 5, 2025
Remember my old Lenovo G50 laptop? Well, it's still around, still working reasonably well. As you may recall, it's got a fabulous eight-boot setup, and I've used it for dozens if not hundreds of distro tests. Currently, the machine runs Windows 10 (which I've not used on this box in three-four years), CentOS 7 and 8, Rocky Linux 8, Manjaro, MX Linux, Fedora, and Ubuntu 20.04. I mostly run the latest, and it's been an okay experience overall. Surprisingly fast and smooth. But an SSD refresh can't go wrong.
Much as I did with my 2014 Lenovo Y50 machine, I'm going to revitalize this 2015 G50 box. It's not sluggish by any means, but the boot times are ridiculous. We're talking two minutes just to log into the Ubuntu session. That's silly. But once logged in, things work well. I can do 1080p playback without any stuttering, the browsing speed and page loading is good. There's really nothing missing from the "modern" experience. So things ought to be even better with a new disk. Let's begin.
Disk replacement process
Easy peasy. In fact, even easier than the Y50. There, I had to take off the entire back cover. Here, there's a separate plate for the replaceable bits. Also, the battery is external, which is extra nice. Three screws, slide the cover, and that's it. Now, I was a bit forceful, so I broke a couple of slide pins, but the plate still fits fine, post surgery.
Inside, there was remarkably little dust. The disk sits on adapter brackets, which are too tall for the SSD. The mechanical device fit fully, snugly, while now, with the Samsung EVO 870 500GB in there, you get this 4mm gap, but the screws keep the disk in place, so that's fine. Anyhow, I finished the task, and booted the machine. No problems. But wait. There's a twist or three.
There was remarkably little dust inside, after 10 years of use ...
With the SSD in place, notice the gap. Well, a little bit of dust, but those are tiny tiny specs.
Operating system choice
I decided to go with Kubuntu 24.04. Why Kubuntu, you ask? As I outlined in my Linux & hardware article, say what you will about the Ubuntu family of distros, but they still, overall, offer the most complete experience package for the Linux desktop. It's not a perfect package, but it's better than everything else. The Pro offering (free for personal use) means 10 years of support. Snaps originate from Canonical's store, so those that are built by the company or have been officially vetted, offer more guarantee than other venues. The FlatHub community store is decent, too, but it's still a community place, as I wrote in my openSUSE Tumbleweed review, and as I outlined in my Fedora & FlatHub story, too. Then, if you need answers to questions, you're more likely to find them for Ubuntu than other distros. By and large, despite certain bloat, Ubuntu and friends are still a tad more stable, a tad more polished than the rest, on average.
Finally, I chose Kubuntu rather than any other flavor because Plasma is 300,000 light years ahead of any other desktop, in every possible and conceivable way. Again, it ain't perfect, but it's slick, beautiful, you can customize it any way you like, be it like Gnome, Unity, Mac, or Windows 10. Technically, I could make my new Kubuntu 24.04 setup look just exactly like the previous one (Ubuntu 20.04), or any more recent version of the distro. That's the sweet power of Plasma.
Why not Ubuntu? Well, Gnome, for starters. Since version 40 or so, it's simply a big no no for me. Previously, I could sort of manage it, as themes were easily customizable, so I could work around the nonsense that is the default, stock Gnome offering, which has no min/max buttons shown, no Show desktop button, no desktop icons, no visible taskbar, and many other expected and logical options. I tried Ubuntu 24.10 recently, and I was disappointed. The biggest problem was the poor clarity of the UI, with pale, unbearable fonts. I could have compiled the theme with my own tweaks, but then I decided it's not 1999 anymore, and I shouldn't be compiling anything just so I can have normal fonts. Nope.
And so, Kubuntu it is. But I did two tests. One before the SSD upgrade, one after.
Here's the Ubuntu 20.04 desktop, just before wiping:
Installations ...
First, I wanted to replace the laptop's busy eight-boot setup with something much simpler. In other words, I wanted to test Kubuntu 24.04 on HDD before moving on to SSD. I wanted to see how a brand-new desktop behaves on this ancient machine. So I booted from a flash drive, and the Calamares installer decided to annoy me, massively.
I chose the option to install right away - rather than boot into the live session first. This turned out to be a mistake for several reasons. One, Calamares complained about not having any Internet connection, and how the installation would be "limited", but there was no option to actually connect to the Web. The warning is also pointless, because the flash media should have everything one needs to run a complete system.
Second, in the partitioning stage, as it had detected all my partitions, the wizard refused to offer an option to just use the whole disk. Nope, I could side-by-side it, replace a single partition, or do a custom setup. Since I wanted to use encryption as well, I had to "wing it". Encrypting the whole disk simply didn't work, Calamares complained how I needed to create an EFI partition (minimum 300 MB) of my own, and mark it with the boot flag, and all that. Why can't this glorified partitioner do this by itself? Why do I need to toil like a peasant, if I've already created a whole new partition table, and the disk is de facto empty now?
I could have booted into the live session, used Plasma's partitioner to zero the disk, and then Calamares would have been able to do the work, plus I'd have the Internet. Two supposedly identical paths to the installation, two completely different outcomes. Annoying and pointless.
And of course, it didn't work. An unbootable system. I tried again, via the live session. Yes, here, you have the option to erase the whole disk. I left the system, came back after a while, and I noticed it had suspended itself. But check this out. It had suspended itself in the middle of the installation! Yup, Plasma's power management has no knowledge of Calamares, and Calamares does not inhibit sleeping, like so many other programs do. Utterly annoying. So instead of me coming back to a fully ready system, I now had to wait yet more time for this wizard to completely its mediocre job. And remember, I still haven't gotten to the SSD part.
The installer slideshow, which renders badly, also has errors so to speak - it mentions VLC, but there's no VLC installed in Kubuntu 24.04 by default. Well, anyway, once this step was done, I rebooted, and timed the system. Guess what? Ninety-three seconds to login screen (after typing in the decryption passphrase), and another ninety-seven seconds from the login screen into a working session. Absolutely bonkers. But I'm sure no developer bothers with old hardware, and they all type leet code on their uber-modern NVMe-powered machines. Frugality is a lost art.
Well, onto to the SSD attempt. The installation completed fine. After the reboot, the laptop tried to do a PXE boot, what. I powered it off, and after that, it started normally. The first session times are now twenty-four seconds to login, and sixteen seconds to a working desktop session. Subsequent sessions clock in at fourteen seconds to login, and just eight to desktop. Not bad. This is actually faster than what I get on the i7-powered Y50. Funny.
The 24.04 session starts with X11, as it should. The system also preserved my Wi-Fi credentials. All of them. I had actually used two different access points in the live session, and both were ported over. My locale was correctly set, nice.
Firefox behavior
As you know, Firefox comes as a snap in Ubuntu and friends. Is this good or bad, you ask? Well, it can always be better. Let me explain. I copied my old browsing profile (from Ubuntu 20.04) into .mozilla. I wanted it preserved, and indeed, the snap will import it, if found. Firefox refused to start, as it complained about an old profile. The usual modern software trash talk. You can work around this pure nonsense with the --allow-downgrade flag. And this worked sort of fine. Profile reused, yay.
Whenever I'd open Firefox from the system menu, it correctly starts with the right profile. Whenever I start Firefox from the icon pinned to the taskbar, it launches with a new, blank profile. I thought I perhaps had two versions of the browser installed. The which command returns /usr/bin/firefox, but this is wrong. There's only the snap version. I resolved the problem by removing the Firefox snap and reinstalling it. Since, every browser start works correctly with the old profile. This is super annoying, and I've encountered this multiple times.
On the positive note, the snap can now use the WebExtensions backend, so add-ons like Video DownloaderHelper and its offline processing code can work correctly. This, too, has been a blocker for a while, but no more.
General usability
It's great. Remarkably solid. The system is now even more responsive than before, with almost instantaneous program launches, very little CPU noise, almost no heating, clean, smooth video playback. It just shows how much the obsessive MBA-flavored marketing hype is just that. Hype. You don't need to be upgrading your hardware all the time. Not at all. This lowly 2015 box has an i3 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and it works splendidly. As I've mentioned a million times before, any decent laptop that's come out in the past decade or so will do 99% of ordinary tasks without any big fuss. It's the gaming that pushes the envelope, but for browsing and mail and such, you don't need more than a potato.
The Plasma desktop is excellent. For fun, I also installed TrueCrypt. No missing libraries. Good. VPN software, no problem at all. Samba speed is even better than it was. The only quirk I noticed is that occasionally, the audio driver would "reset" itself. I'd see a quick popup on the screen, and that's it. Once, this unmuted the speakers and the microphone. Not sure why, but it ain't good. Needs more investigation.
The default media player Haruna is nowhere near as good as VLC. It's just annoying, and another example of the 100th iteration of the typical media player that only resolves 70% of use cases. VLC lets you control the playback with up/down keys, and you seek with left/right, plus Ctrl for 1min jumps. Haruna uses all of the keys for seek, and the increments are never good. Also, it always stalled playing from Samba shares, taking as much as five or six seconds buffering before anything shows up. VLC plays instantly. Haruna also starts multiple instances, by default, so if you want to play another file, you end up with two videos in parallel.
And it seems I will need to replace the battery soon. Still, not bad.
Conclusion
I am pleased with my SSD upgrade on the Lenovo G50, I am pleased with the choice of the operating system. I was able to preserve my data, everything works, and I gained a solid boost in speed and responsiveness. All in all, a rather successful endeavor. Never forget, this is a 2015 laptop, with an ancient i3 processor, but it handles 1080p smoothly, and unless you play games, you can do every single modern 2025 task fine. Don't let the greedy vampires tell you how you must refresh your gear or any similar nonsense. You can, if you want to, but there's absolutely no pressing need, in most cases. An SSD that costs 50-70 dollars will do the trick. Oh, how much do I detest this modern world of corporate hustling and nonstop bs.
My potato lives and should serve me well for quite a while longer. It's even got a DVD tray should I truly feel decadent. In terms of usefulness and cost value, it's approaching the venerable eeePC netbook. In some ways, it exceeds it, because the netbook never could do any fancy stuff. This one still can, just fine. If you check my old 10-year-mark reviews of various laptops from my past, like the T42, the abovementioned netbook, some other laptops, and alike, you will definitely notice the shrinking of the performance gap. Once, yes, you needed new hardware frequently to get all the benefits. Since 2011 or so, definitely 2014 or so, the hardware revolution has plateaued. The only thing driving the market is software bloat really. Nothing a wee SSD can't fix, and if you slap the right operating system onto it, like Kubuntu 24.04 for instance, you should enjoy yourself. I know I did. Well, 'tis almost like getting a new machine, a second gift. See you around.
Cheers.