What is her usecase? I'm currently using a t480s and I like it so far with some slight cons. I use it for basic office/work type of tasks tho. You say that she won't install windows on it so something linux based I assume.
On the one hand, it is light! It weighs less than 1.5 kilos so I sometimes end up having to check or feel my bag on my back to see if I'm actually carrying it lol. Really convenient weight for my college, often end up using my laptop for presentations and any sort of work due to the fact I'm always carrying it around. Compare that to the 2kg+ laptops that my friends and peers have that is just to heavy to carry around and hence they just leave it at the hostel.
On the otherhand, I wish I had spent like 10k more (to around 40k) and just bought one of the new budget ryzen laptops instead. As I'm a part of the media teams for events, I have to often edit videos and stuff together, and I would say it performs better than my ancient xeon e3 1230 v2 and rx570 pc at home, but not by a large margin. Premiere pro is far more stable tho and doesn't crash at random *that often anymore*, that's for sure. But the new ryzen chips along with their better igpu would have made work faster in these situations. However this usecase occurs like what? 2 times a month at best, so it's not a big deal.
It's been almost 8 months if I'm not wrong that I had this laptop and I only faced 2 issues so far, once the laptop just started burning, as in the fans were going full speed, laptop was like burning hot. For some reason when I put the laptop to sleep, it instead just seemed to go completely haywire. Couldn't access anything on the screen. Thankfully I knew the hard reset button on the back so I took a pen and just pressed it, and the laptop reset itself. I then disabled sleep automatically and only allow it to go to sleep when I close my laptop. The second issue was some random BSOD once, but that was nothing honestly
For anything else tho, it's great. Doesn't heat up 80% of the time (I can't remember if it heats up when you're watching youtube lol). Has USB-C charging which is nice, 1 charger for all. Screen is IPS and works great indoors. The metal build on it is also sturdy, I bought a basic foam case on amazon and that gives it all the protection it needs. Battery life depends on the laptop but thinkpad parts are easy to replace, your seller himself will be able to source a brand new battery for it. Rn battery backup for me is fine, I don't need to replace it yet, with basic web browsing and stuff it will last like 5 hours on a full charge, plus the laptop itself charges up fast again going from like 40% to 90% in 20 minutes or so.
Ah sorry, kept blabbering on and I didn't even answer your question. T480s is hard to find, I spent I think 29K on mine total, originally it was 27? He added another 8gb stick which was of the same type for another 2k, fair price or not I just didn't want to bother installing it. It's best you find one within your city, I found mine through olx. Had to call around many refurb shops asking for the t480s but they wasted a good amount of my time thinking I asked for a t480. As
@kalph09 said, try to find a newer model but those start bumping significantly in price and you have to consider whether it will be actually worth it for her usecase
