I bought a $360 Thinkpad w520 quad core mostly to see if I could move from linux in VMs to it being a daily driver. That was two weeks ago. I'm amazed at how well it works: this laptop has a nightmare graphics setup (Nvidia Optimus) but it works very well when you pick a card in the bios; the Optimus setup doesn't work very well. On the other hand, it isn't even supported in Windows 10: I tried it anyway, and it keep crashing. Meanwhile, Ubuntu 16.04 is a revelation (I mostly used Linux Mint in the VMs). Fast, very stable, 7 hour battery on integrated graphics, works with one DP monitor (haven't tried two yet, waiting for a docking station to arrive). I use it for development, VMs and RDP, fantastic experience so far. To my amazement, Wine can even run Excel & Word (2010). I have never got Office working in Linux before, this is quite amazing, although ultimately not very useful since it seems to run Windows VMs better than my 2015 i7 mac (which is only dual core), and LibreOffice is almost different software on Linux vs the mac, it's so much better. Ubuntu is really good to use, it's very fast to move around apps and workpaces, great keyboard shortcuts. There are a lot of moving parts but it seems to hang together.
Plus my bluetooth magic trackpad worked. So I'm probably going to get an entrylevel quad-core P50 in the next month or two, and sell the macbook; I think I'll finish ahead, so I'll put the change towards a good Chromebook.
I have it working with two DP monitors and the laptop screen. But this only works in XFCE not Unity, even though I use lightdm with XFCE. Optimus actually probably would have worked out of the box except that I added a brightness control xorg.conf tweak which broke Optimus (the problem with 2011 hardware is a lot of neolithic advice). With 16.04.2's 4.8 kernel and Nvidia 367 driver that tweak isn't necessary anyway.
