Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

111 points by khandelwal 15 years ago | 272 comments

What's a good laptop to install Linux (Ubuntu) on? I'm looking to buy a new machine for work. System76 seems to make good laptops. Does anyone have experience with them? Is there anything else you would recommend?

People seem to rave about their MacBook Pros. Is it easy to make the switch from Ubuntu? Do I easily get all the software I'll need (svn, git, django, python, vim)?

Essentially I think, my question is, is the experience on a MBP so much better, that it's worth having to learn the MacOS platform?

yummyfajitas 15 years ago |

If you want to do development in a language other than python/ruby, or even want to use python libraries written in c, avoid the macbook. If you are certain you will stick to {svn, git, django, python, vim}, you'll be fine. My mac ownership timeline:

Day 1: Ooh, pretty.

2-3 days: I fucking hate iTunes. Luckily ports install mpd works.

1 month: Ooh, the pretty magsafe connector saved me from dropping it when I tripped over the wire.

1.5 months: Arrgh, finally numpy works.

2 months: I miss XMonad.

3 months: Fuck, random C/C++ library (e.g., amqp_lib, boost for a while, quantlib, some Fortran medical imaging libraries) doesn't work. Or maybe it would work if I messed around with it more. Neither do many Haskell libraries (e.g. HFuse). I never managed to get postgres working either, though I've heard others have.

4 months: I want to get work done. Open up virtualbox, boot ubuntu server in a VM.

2 years later: load linux onto a thinkpad. Woohoo!

[edit: I am being a little unfair to the macbook. It has one fantastic feature which I still miss: keynote + LaTeXit + that little remote control. This makes pretty and very effective scientific presentations. OpenOffice Impress is not in the same league. It's less relevant to me now, since I'm no longer an academic mathematician.

Also, I don't mean to be unduly negative on macs. They just didn't satisfy me as a development box.

Lastly, things might have changed recently. I gave away my macbook early this year.]

tkaemming 15 years ago | |

Odd — I'm running Snow Leopard and haven't had any issues with many of the libraries or apps you mentioned (boost, ampqlib, postgresql), although it's probably worth noting that I installed them all through Homebrew (http://www.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/).

yummyfajitas 15 years ago | | |

That reminds me of another thing I disliked about macs. An open question: who is in charge? Macports? Fink? I couldn't pick one, because neither one had what I wanted.

I think Homebrew is fairly new. If it works, I'm glad, but it didn't exist a few years back. So, a disclaimer I should have included in my original post: things might have changed in the past year.

The package manager I found useful was virtualbox + apt-get.

bradendouglass 15 years ago | | |

Same here, homebrew rocks Fink and Macports way out of the water. If you need any type of packet management and you are on a Mac, it should be your go to option.

dzlobin 15 years ago | | |

psycopg2 on snow leopard has been notoriously fucked forever. There are thousands of blog posts on installing this, of which only one has worked for me in the past.

This, granted, wasn't through homebrew; I wonder if that would have worked back then

buro9 15 years ago | |

Uncanny. I'm also 4 months in and am running Ubuntu in VMWare. That's now where I spend all of my time and I'm wondering why I haven't just dual-booted already or just over-written the OSX partition.

lusis 15 years ago | | |

Last company I was at provided me a quad-core 8GB mac pro. After the first week I wiped it and put Ubuntu on it so I could actually get some work done.

The biggest problem with OSX is that, for a unix-based system, it's so un-unix alike in key places that it's frustrating.

megamark16 15 years ago | | |

Are you me? 'Cause you sound just like me. I've even installed Ubuntu on a separate partition via Boot Camp, but I haven't had time to get all the stuff that doesn't work out of the box working. Maybe that will be my weekend project, we'll see... Good luck to you...me?

qtcoder 15 years ago | | |

Installed virtual box on the first day and running Ubuntu since then.The day i convince myself(atleast fool myself) that i haven't spent too many bucks for OSX, will overwrite the partition.

cvg 15 years ago | | |

I, like many others, also use virtualbox for development. So much easier to develop on something close to my production servers, but it uses up too much memory.

I've been looking at some cheap Walmart/Frys PCs to install ubuntu on and develop.

rafiq 15 years ago | | |

Unfortunately the dual boot solution does not work if you're writing low-level code as I found out when playing with some gnu assembler code. I mostly do development on a VirtualBox machine. I'm considering switching back to a PC.

timwiseman 15 years ago | |

I must say that while I am not a huge fan of OSX, Macs have amazingly well designed hardware. I remembering staring and marvelling at the magsafe power cord the first time I saw it, and every piece of the hardware is well made too.

kevinbutler 15 years ago | | |

Having just had to replace a magsafe power cord (fortunately Apple does it free now, even out-of-warranty), I think the design needed a bit of tweaking, which later models have received.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1713 issue #6 , "strain relief issues"

technomancy 15 years ago | |

Macs are a lot more solidly-built than they used to be, but there are a few of things still keeping them from being competitive with Thinkpads. 0) They don't try to compete on screen resolution. The 13-inch Macbook screen is only 800 pixels tall, which is fewer pixels than my phone. 1) They're quite heavy. In particular the 13-inch is only marginally lighter than the 15-inch. 2) The glossy screens make them unusable outdoors.

Perhaps if you mostly keep your laptop on your desk this wouldn't be a big deal, but it rules them out for people who like to move around.

saveriomiroddi 15 years ago | | |

Confirmed here. I've chosen a Thinkpad x200s over a MacBook Pro.

Advantages of an x200s over a MacBook Pro 13": - high screen resolution: 1440x900 - smaller and lighter - I can change the HDD very easily - one USB plug more - the x201s also has support for Intel Core i7.

Disadavantages: - Battery life, I guess - Speakers, but doesn't matter for business users - Webcamera, whose lank on TP is quite strange

DVD writer is personal preference. I explicitly don't want it in laptops.

From a strictly techical perspective, although more loosely business one, choosing a Thinkpad x20*s over a Macbook Pro 13 is a no-brainer.

slantyyz 15 years ago | | |

I don't think you could do much work on a 13" screen anyways. The 15" mbps, however, are competitive with resolution with the latest generation.

tjr 15 years ago | |

Just to toss this question in, because I've seen lots of people make a similar comment, but never have really seen an explanation as to why: what is the problem with iTunes?

For me, I don't do much in the way of using iTunes; I set up a play list, press play, minimize it, and enjoy listening to music while I do other things. Maybe I'm not a music player power user?

yummyfajitas 15 years ago | | |

Some "features" of iTunes:

When I import my music folder, iTunes copies all the files to it's own private directories, using the filesystem as an index. Thanks, but my music is already arranged the way I like.

iTunes doesn't play flac or ogg. And when I rip a CD, it wants to save it in some proprietary flac-like format (which, as far as I know, does not work on non-macs).

I enjoy controlling my music from a phone/tablet/other computer. Shameless plug: http://github.com/stucchio/DJ-Pirate http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/software/djpirate/screenshot1.... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/software/djpirate/screenshot3....

iTunes + iPod also has some extremely unpleasant anti-features: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1202

(Note: this may not all still be true, haven't used iTunes since 2007. )

spiffworks 15 years ago | | |

Well, for one thing its format support is conservative. Like most people who haven't lived in the Mac ecosystem their whole computing lives, I have my music collection in a variety of formats- mp3, ogg, flac, etc. I would like very much to have a media player which didn't ask me to bend to its will. This of course is not an issue for most people, but its a sore sticking point for people who try to switch from Linux. In Linux, if you find a file in an obscure format, you can always find a gstreamer plugin for it and totem(or anything else) will play it without losing a step.

I myself tried to switch, but gave up after about a week. One of the main reasons was the iMac's boot time. After having used Fedora and Ubuntu, I found it unbearably slow. Was my experience just an anomaly or is this the general case?

matwood 15 years ago | | |

I'm not an iTunes hater since I use it all the time, but it does have it's issues.

The primary issue is that it is SLOW. I have an i7 MBP that everything flies on except iTunes. Now, to be fair iTunes seems to work fine when just playing music. I have a decent library (30GBs +) that it handles okay. The problems arise when doing anything else with iTunes like podcasts, movies, updating apps, or anything having to do with ITMS.

Apple has made iTunes the centerpiece of their entire ecosystem. One would think that they would have at least tried to optimize it while throwing everything and the kitchen sink in featurewise.

watty 15 years ago | | |

I dislike iTunes because it's so bloated and memory hungry (unless it changed changed over the years). I use Foobar2k to do the same thing, load up and just play music.

more_original 15 years ago | |

I had almost exactly the same experience. I had a Mac (Powerbook) for almost 3 years and could get work done, but development was sometimes a hassle where it shouldn't have been (just to upgrade gcc one had to download 2gigs of XCode; installing exotic C/C++ libraries had to be done by hand; any X11-app, like inkscape, is a real pain to use; things like that). And in the end I was only using apps that have a natural home on Linux anyway (vim, latex, ocaml, java, inkscape).

I now run Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and that "Just Works" for development more than the Powerbook ever did.

fnl 15 years ago | |

I use OSX 10.6 for C and Python, at times Cpp and only if forced to I even do Ruby or Java development on my MBPs (got two - boast...). I do not like either fink or MacPorts and install everything myself. So far, I have not encountered a single library or program I needed and was not able to install after some research at worst. This means virtually all essential C and C++ libraries mentioned in these posts (I do not bother with "junk" - and OSX comes with a sensible default selection, too). The only big boo-hoo is that OSX' Python build is a narrow build, but fixes a socket problem that makes using MacPython slightly unattractive. So, if you really only want hardcore development from your beloved shell and vi, get a laptop and run Gentoo. If you want to enjoy digital media (movies, sound, etc.) while working and want to have a consistent and interoperable UI experience, go Mac. Period.

mgedmin 15 years ago | | |

And if you want something in the middle, get Ubuntu.

thecoffman 15 years ago | |

I do my primary development on a Mac and haven't had problems with boost, etc. I occasionally run into dependency problems or other frustrations, but no more than I would on any other system. I just enjoy the overall flexibility of having the POSIX system for development, but a ui that doesn't look and work like it thrown together by some kid in a garage when I want just want to web surf or play media, etc. I would highly recommend going the Mac route personally , but it really boils down to personal preference.

vilya 15 years ago | |

I agree, but you forgot to mention the killer issue (for me): there's no '#' key. Having to press Alt+3 for a '#' gets annoying pretty quickly when you're coding.

It's even worse if you're running Linux on the MacBook. You have to fiddle with a mysteriously named keyboard preference ("Key to choose 3rd level") to get even the Alt+3 combination to work - and once it does, you can no longer Alt+Tab to switch between windows. Fortunately you can choose a different key; the best compromise I've found so far is to the right Alt key. That way you can enter '#' symbols and Alt+Tab back and forth, but it turns what should be a single keystroke into a two handed combination.

That and the lagging OpenGL support are why my next computer won't be a Mac.

artlogic 15 years ago | | |

I'm confused by what you're saying here - do you have a keyboard with '#' as a primary key? Every keyboard I've ever used requires shift-3 to generate a '#'.

Your reference to 3rd level keys seems to refer to an international keyboard. Is your keyboard not a U.S. layout?

boothead 15 years ago | |

I recently (2 days ago) installed refit on my macbook pro and now have a dual boot with ubuntu 10.10 (which, by the way, rocks so hard I might not boot back into OSX again).

That's the best of both worlds for me: mac hardware, OSX for my wife and ubuntu for me. Perfect.

eru 15 years ago | |

Can't you just run Linux on your Macbook?

yummyfajitas 15 years ago | | |

The Blub paradox applies to operating systems, not just languages. You can only avoid the Blub paradox by truly immersing yourself, and I was making a genuine attempt to do that.

Macs are truly not right for me - if I gave up and switched to linux 3 months in, I'd never have known that.

slantyyz 15 years ago | |

You would have saved a lot of time, pain and effort if you just spent Day 1 installing Linux on your laptop whether it was a dual boot or via virtualization.

aconbere 15 years ago |

I can not rave enough about the Lenovo X201 small, fast, usable. I switched to the lenovo machine after using a MBP for the previous 4 years. But it really depends on what you need and want. I commute with my laptop, travel with my laptop, and generally like to carry it arround. I'm not willing to accept either of the choices that Apple has for me, excessive weight (MBP 15' or 17'), or last generation processors (MBP 13').

That being said almost all the developers I know use MBPs. Just not me. I was CPU constrained for the work I was doing, wanted to easily upgrade my hard drive, and spent all my time in OSX in XMonad anyway. So making "the switch" was simple for me.

EDIT - adding my one X201 complaint

No built in digital video out (W.T.F.) I'm sure this is to accommodate some suit who has to attach to projectors. But feels like the past. If you shell out for a docking station you'll get DV but otherwise you're out of luck. (This is not an issue with Lenovo's larger laptops like the T410 etc.)

mahmud 15 years ago |

You can't go wrong with a Thinkpad, in fact, I wouldn't use any other laptop if it came free. I ran thinkpads exclusively for the last 10 years. My last desktop machine had an AMD Duron and 256 megs, that's long ago it was.

They're not the most good looking, but they're rugged and functional as hell. A Thinkpad looks the same after 5 years, most others peel and scratch. When I was backpacking, my road-mate had his macbook come apart .. literally, the case feel out of the bottom and the top came apart. Mine? I threw it into truck beds, buses, ferries, sat on it, slept on it, and it endured everything including the humidity in the Mekong and freezing weather in north-east China, not to mention power surges.

Jun8 15 years ago |

I went through the same exact process you are going through a few months ago, my manager wanted to replace our laptops with new, Linux-based ones and asked us what to get. I switched to a 15" MBP, being never a Mac person before.

The first week or so was painful. Mac OS wasn't as intuitive as I though it would be and it may be hard to find how to do things as a power Linux user. But after that initial learning curve, god it's good. Just the hardware itself is worth it, the feel, and of course the screen, which is one of the most important parts of a laptop I think. Finding and installing packages is OK with Homebrew (or MacPorts), not as intuitive as apt perhaps, though.

I have friends using a Thinkpad and if you ask me again today, I would definitely repeat my decision to go with the MBP. Maybe you're giving away a wee bit of Ubuntu goodness but you gain tremendously from hardware and being able to use other Mac software, which is very very good.

jacoblyles 15 years ago | |

I feel stupid whenever I sit down at a computer without multi-touch and spotlight now. The software of a mac is just so nice and polished.

kls 15 years ago | | |

I could not live without multi-touch now. It is a true mouse killer. I am sure it has added 30% to my productivity alone. Someone turned me on to BetterTouchTools and the rest has been history. With 3 finger click copy, 4 finger click paste I can blaze through a lot of tasks.

maco 15 years ago | |

The screen's the most important part? I think it's the keyboard. Typing without looking isn't a problem.

Symmetry 15 years ago |

Pretty much everyone I know who runs Linux on their laptop uses a Thinkpad. They don't come with Linux installed but they tend to have good driver support and pretty good quality.

You might also consider system76, but I don't have experience with those.

EDIT: I'm currently running Linux on my T410. Suspend was broken with Ubuntu 10.4, but everything works perfectly now with 10.10.

kls 15 years ago |

Yes the MBP is a good machine, and you can get all of the items you listed on OSX. It is a good development platform if you decide to go that route. I have worked exclusively on MBP for the last two generations of my machines. This is coming from a guy that got burnt really bad on the 68-PPC conversion a while back (had basically a brick within 6mo of buying a new 68). That is another story but sufficient to say, I swore off Apple computers and after using a MBP for a while, I decided that it really was worth the switch. I don't consider myself a fanboy so I feel that I offer a pragmatic opinion to people on the advantages of switching.

Also a thing to consider is that with the MBP if you decide that OSX is not for you, you can always install Linux or do Bootcamp and dual boot, or run Virtual Box and have a Linux VM. I do the latter for any odds and ends Windows only software that I need to run, but those are getting fewer and fewer these days.

If you decide to stay in the PC world I recommend Sager laptops. They are probably close to or superior to the MBP in terms of quality.

tsuraan 15 years ago |

For the past few years, I've been using a Sony Z590. My major concerns with a laptop are battery life, portability, and screen real estate. For the Z590, I get 8-10 hours of battery life (8 with wifi on, 10 on a plane). The machine is a 13.3" laptop, and it's light, so portability is there. Those two features can be found in other laptops, but the screen is a 13.3" 1600x900 display; I haven't found any laptops from any other manufacturers that do that on such a small laptop. The new Sony Z-series have full 1080p displays, so they're a bit higher res at the same size.

The machine runs Linux well enough; suspend works, all the hardware works except for the fingerprint reader and the built-in camera. The video is a hybrid graphics with nVidia and Intel; IME nVidia sucks under linux, so I've just had it disabled and use only the GM45 card. I've heard that the latest Z series users are sometimes having trouble with their video, but I think the latest rc kernel has the support required (always the case with linux and latest hardware...).

As far as using Linux on a Macbook, how do you get around the lack of a middle and right click? Is the multi-touch/gesture stuff actually in the touchpad hardware so Linux sees a proper three button scroll mouse, or what? I think I'd go mad trying to use Linux on a single-button touchpad.

balu 15 years ago |

I just switched to Ubuntu again - on a two year old Macbook Pro 4,1 though.

To tell a bit about the software side on a Mac: As long as you don't mess with the system, it runs nicely. Recently I wanted to have a look at clutter ("software library for creating (...) graphical user interfaces") which depends on newer versions of the libraries that ship with OS X. After fiddling around with building it myself (or building Formulae for Homebrew which is a simple and nice package manager for OS X) I decided to go with Ubuntu and Awesome as my window manager. There was just too many barriers in the way. For web development, OS X was nice. Unfortunately I'm also toying around with a lot of music software which rarely has an OSS equivalent.

Some points on Apple hardware: The build quality is very nice. It might not have the latest stuff, but all components they ship are well integrated and usually don't get you into hassle (as long as you stick with OS X). I honestly don't want to miss the multitouch trackpad.

Conclusion: If you can live with the system that OS X is, go for it. Perhaps you'll get pissed some day about the missing freedom some day. Don't expect that the hardware in a MacBook will fully supported in a Linux distro

kls 15 years ago | |

For web development, OS X was nice

I honestly don't want to miss the multitouch trackpad

These are the key take aways, OSX is good for web / mobile development and the track pad is one hell of a plus for going with a MBP. I would not use OSX for C or C++ development or any system development for that matter, but for web and mobile it is a great system.

Maro 15 years ago |

On a MBP you can easily run all the software you listed. We use MBP for cross-platform C++ and Python programming. A somewhat complete list of tools we use in our startup: XCode, Textmate, Araxis Merge, Makefiles, python, svn (or Versions), git (or SmartGit), python, vim, joe, OpenOffice, MS Office (the new 2011 version rocks), Keynote, FF, Chrome, Safari, Pixelmator, TexShop, CyberDuck, Dropbox, MacPorts.

djhworld 15 years ago | |

'joe'?

CrazedGeek 15 years ago | | |

This, presumably: http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/

barrkel 15 years ago | | |

It's my favourite ad-hoc in-terminal editor too. Keyboard shortcuts are in the style of the old Borland text IDEs.

thomas11 15 years ago |

I'm extremely happy with my 11.6" Acer Aspire 1410. There must be newer variants by now. With its one-core Intel CULV it doesn't have much horse power, but then it's dirt cheap. You can get four for the price of a Macbook, which makes you not worry about taking it everywhere. It feels pretty fast doing regular work and programming. Linux works great on it. It still feels like a laptop to me, not like a netbook. There's both VGA (for projectors) and digital video out.

lfnik 15 years ago |

I have a System76 laptop and I really like it. The built in speakers are terrible but I usually use headphones so who cares. The touch pad buttons are a little stubborn too.

Other than that boot-up time is pretty fast, and I don't spend hours trying to find drivers for hardware. And it cost me half of what a Macbook Pro would.

chapmanb 15 years ago | |

I can second the System76 laptop recommendation. I got a Lemur laptop from them last year:

http://www.system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=28&produc...

Sound, wifi and the camera work fine and it's been through a couple of Ubuntu upgrades with no issues. I was specifically looking for something that would be zero maintenance and have been very happy.

rbanffy 15 years ago |

It depends on what you are running.

I run Emacs a lot, develop for Django, run Eclipse very rarely and I am quite happy with a very modest Acer netbook. Most of the time, it sits on my desk connected to a big monitor, keyboard and mouse. Web browsing and Flash-heavy sites are a problem, as is the Intel GMA due to the 2048x2048 screen size limitation for hardware acceleration.

I can't overestimate how welcome is the portability it affords carrying my whole "desktop" environment in a small bag. If I drop it, everything important is backed up thanks to the twin miracles of rsync and version control.

I have long given up on high-end notebooks. They are typically big and heavy and faster than I usually need. Also, losing one is a bit more painful than just having to pay US$400 for a faster equivalent and doing an environment restore.

kgo 15 years ago |

I personally find long-term use of X annoying and clunky, so the Mac interface wins out there. (Please don't try to convince me I'm wrong about X. If you don't have a problem with it, that's cool.)

If you're just doing basic run-of-the-mill web development, and it looks like you are, then a MBP will work just fine. If you're in Vim and Bash all day long, there isn't really much for you to learn. Some things are a little quirky, off the top of my head I think Apache2 is installed in a weird location, and command line app X may not be installed by default, but it's probably no more obscure than switching to a BSD or Solaris.

futuremint 15 years ago |

I have a ZaReason Strata Pro 13" with an SSD. The processor is by no means fast, but its fast enough for coding & web design. Any heavier work (like high-res graphics, video editing, or intensive compiling) would probably be annoying.

Its a good laptop with Ubuntu 10.10, only thing not working is suspend automatically when the lid is closed.

Money no object and you need Linux than a ThinkPad would be your best bet. Expensive, but awesome keyboards and pretty durable & reliable.

You can install Linux on a MBP as a commenter has already mentioned, but you have to install a weird open source EFI thing for boot, and it'd be tricky to get support for the newest hardware.

Another option is to use Ubuntu in VirtualBox on OS X. You can install all of your favorite Linux packages in OS X, but they're patched and you can't always get the latest release without some work. AFAIK all of the open-source package management systems for OS X are source based so you get to watch things compile. I used to have a MBP and compiling new software was always annoying to me.

hogu 15 years ago | |

how's the battery life on that thing?

Uchikoma 15 years ago |

Am I the only one who is using a Lenovo machine (X200) and hating it and would do nearly everything to go back to a MBP?

(X200 feels cheap, plastic breaks, lcd dies, battery replaced twice, hibernation does not work all the time, sound problems, logos flew off, ....)

I was using a small Dell laptop at my last job and the quality was much much better than the X200.

Essentially after IBM sold them the quality tanked.

drats 15 years ago | |

For me it's the opposite, I had a white macbook and the casing cracked and the hdd failed (along with an iPhone with 3G that didn't work - powercord that frayed and headphones that died). The X200 on the other hand has a much higher quality keyboard and seems to be a higher quality than all my past Apple products. After being locked into paying for 3G for two years and not having the phone work with it I will not be buying Apple ever again as they have personally cost me hundreds and hundreds and don't support their products in the slightest. That's to say nothing of how Ubuntu decimates the horrible package management on OSX and is light-years ahead in many other areas.

mkramlich 15 years ago | | |

1. the white macbook is by intent their cheapest, and therefore, lowest durability/quality laptop. that's the whole point really. their more expensive product models do have a reputation of being more robust. everything costs.

2. "don't support their products in the slightest" <-- this is hyperbole because it's easily shown to be false by hundreds of stories on the web from people who have had good support experiences with Apple.

aidenn0 15 years ago |

MacBook Pros have their ups and downs:

Ups: 1) Really nice construction 2) Really well put together GUI 3) In general it's a nicer experience than a non-mac with similar tech-specs.

Downs: 1) No standard central packaging system; All the software you mention is available on the mac but you have to either: a) Build it yourself b) Use macports or fink, etc. Furthermore, some of the more gui focused things have very nice mac-native ports (e.g. MacVim) but you'll have to track those down yourself. 2) Price. You can get a very nice non-mac laptop every year for the same price as getting the 17" Macbook Pro every 2 years. I compare to the 17" since I won't code on anything with less that 1200 vertical lines. If you plan on only coding with an external monitor, this may not apply. 3) Not super configurable. You get something very well put together and designed, but that also means there aren't a lot of options.

I had the option of getting a macbook pro at work but went with a Dell instead.

jc00ke 15 years ago |

I'm in total awe of the MBP from a hardware point of view, yet just cannot get myself to spend that much money. I've ran 9.04, 9.10 & 10.04 with little to no problems on a Lenovo Y650 "consumer grade" laptop and have been very happy. 2.53GHz dual core Intel, 4GB RAM, HDMI, wifi, etc, all the same specs as last years MBP, but I paid ~$700 for what was normally a $1300 laptop. Lenovo had $500 off & 12% discount on top of that... for no reason (except to make me happy)

The only upgrade I made was an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD. It screams. Get one, or whatever SSD in that bracket or above that suits your pocketbook.

Last thing: I'm working on a brand new iMac at my current gig and I don't like it. I'm not a fan of OSX. I've tried several times but I just prefer Linux. Debian based systems with apt are so easy. Ports & Fink for OSX suck, so if you do go with a MBP, look into http://j.mp/mxcl-homebrew.

ohyes 15 years ago |

In contrast to the army of Thinkpad/MBP users; I've been using a (fairly generic) Toshiba laptop (It is an older satellite model) to run Ubuntu. It has been rock solid for me for 2-3 years now.

The key thing is to make sure that all of the hardware in whatever laptop you buy has proper drivers. This can either be accomplished by buying a cheaper laptop with slightly less top of the line hardware (hardware that is slightly aged is more likely to have had someone debugging driver issues on it), or by checking that all of the hardware has appropriate drivers.

http://www.linux-drivers.org/ might be a good starting place.

bsaunder 15 years ago |

I faced the same question a year ago. My solution was a MBP with Parallels running Ubuntu. I couldn't be happier. I'm still working more in Ubuntu than MacOS, but it's nice to have the fall back of the host operating system.

jamwt 15 years ago | |

I do this same thing (but with VMWare Fusion); the only significant drawback is the substantially slower disk I/O within the VM.

I spend all my time in an Ubuntu VM running XMonad, mainly so that I can use nice os x apps (mac end-user apps are just freakin' awesome, especially 3rd party apps) and so that I don't spend 2 days fixing my sound or my wireless card after an overzealous apt-get upgrade screws it up.

Ten years ago I considered it fun endlessly tweaking my OS to play nicely with my hardware, but these days, I just want to get stuff done. So, the Mac pretty much guarantees the host machine is running harmoniously since the OS and hardware were purpose-built for each other.

metamemetics 15 years ago |

For linux just avoid anything with an ATI graphics card and go with nvidia. ESPECIALLY if you want to attempt triple booting MacOSX\iATKOS on it.

I've gotten good mileage out of a Dell XPS Studio 16 w/ubuntu but can't recommend it due to driver issues with wireless (avoid intel5100) and graphics (radeon hd3760).

If I was buying a new laptop I would search the hackintosh and iATKOS forums to find models that can install OSX out of the box and triple boot it.

After that, figure out exactly what resolution\size pixels per inch you want the display. I like 1600x900 for laptops myself. That should narrow it down to only a couple models.

RossM 15 years ago | |

I have a Dell Studio 15 (laptop) and while it's a fairly nice build I'd have to say stay away from Dell if you want to run Linux - when I started using Ubuntu (around 8.04) I had so many driver issues it was silly. 10.04 hasn't been bad though (yet to test out 10.10).

jamesg 15 years ago |

I love my Thinkpad. It's had all sorts of tortuous treatment and just keeps on ticking. It was kind of amazing the first time I spilt water on it to have it drain out through the holes in the bottom of it and just keep going (I've also stepped on it, dropped it, etc; I'm actually very careful with my computers, but when you work with it 14+ hours a day for a few years, sooner or later you're going to do something stupid with it).

I have the x61, which is great. If I were buying one today, I'd probably get one of the x300 series; they seem to have a slower CPU than the x61 (and x200), but faster graphics, and better screen resolution. CPUs are fast enough that it almost doesn't matter these days (for web dev anyway), but faster graphics are always good -- I really feel the screen redraw when switching desktops with it plugged into my 26 inch monitor (still, this machine is like, 2.5 years old).

For me, having a lightweight and portable machine is pretty key. I also have an MBP (15 inch), but it's so much more work to throw into my backpack and lug around. I always have my Thinkpad with me, which is a huge part of what makes it valuable.

... Man, I am such a fanboy! :)

juiceandjuice 15 years ago | |

I have the X61s, totally maxed out the 9 cell battery, 1.8Ghz ULV processor, 4GB ram, and a 7200RPM 160GB hard drive. It still feels faster than most other laptops after more than two years. I had to replace the battery, which was okay because they had them at the lenovo outlet for 45 bucks, and so now I get 6+ hours (true) battery life once again.

Way better than my original first-run 13" white macbook. That being said, I started a new job and I'm getting a maxed out 15" macbook pro. I miss Mac OS, and I'll be living in an IDE, so that's why I chose the macbook. Otherwise it'd be a hard choice between a macbook and a T400S.

The x3* series is now discontinued.

jamesg 15 years ago | |

Oh, forgot to mention: I've been running Ubuntu on it exclusively for the last few years. Suspend and resume has been flakey in some releases of Ubuntu, ok in others (I've given up trying, honestly), but otherwise the hardware support has been flawless.

Yaggo 15 years ago |

> Essentially I think, my question is, is the experience on a MBP so much better, that it's worth having to learn the MacOS platform?

Shortly, yes. Mac as a platform (hw & sw) is really solid and beautiful, letting you to focus on your work, instead of configuring your machine. I used various Linux distros (Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu) as my primaly OS from 1998 to 2006, until switched to Mac with no previous experience. It took few months before it felt like home, but after that I have never considered to swithing back.

Your Linux skills will be in great use on server side.

> Do I easily get all the software I'll need (svn, git, django, python, vim)?

No problem. You can have even apt-get. Check out these:

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ & http://www.macports.org/

PS. As a FOSS advocate, in my wildest dream the FOSS community will some day come up with something as elegant as OS X, but unfortunately it's hard to see that happening.

templaedhel 15 years ago |

System 76 is good if you want to pay extra for the convience of having all the drivers ready to install. The machines work out of box, end of story. Thy are solid, fair battery life, and not an eyesore. However you pay more then an equivilent laptop with windows, and they aren't amazing from a design standpoint either. The service is good, your calls are answered in an office, not a call center in India. If you opt to go with some other brand, use nvidia for graphics, as the support for drivers is much better. Asus makes good machines, and I find ubuntu runs on them almost out of the box as well. MacBook pros are solid machines. If you are big on design, they look and feel great. However in my opinion it's not worth the extra $700. I have never tried programming on a mac, but the feeling I get from friends, and reading the comments is that anything besides web design/development and you will start to run into problems.

hendler 15 years ago |

Currently having the same debate. Will I stick with a MBP, or go with a non-Apple and run Ubuntu?

I currently run VMWare Fusion on 4gigs of ram. The decision points, for me, revolve around:

* battery life - quad cores are 48nm, which is why MBP stuck with i7 32nm presumably. * price/performance - for $800 I have a 6 core desktop with 8 gigs of ram. For a $2000 budget I can get a desktop and a laptop, and have the VM on an external drive, swap the drive between machines out depending on where I'm working from. * durability, convenience and stability - can you do what you need to do without things breaking? DRM? Package management. There are a lot of trade-offs in either direction * job requirements - still need to debug in browsers on mac and windows. running osx in a virtual machine isn't super easy/legal.

Since I've come to terms with most of the issues above, I've been wanting to not get a MBP. I can always keep my old mac, too. I'm not developing ipad/iphone apps...

daleharvey 15 years ago |

I made the switch to a macbook pro a few months ago

Its nice to have a laptop that just works, suspend resume is really awesome. The polish on the whole thing is pretty nice too.

It still isnt a flexible as ubuntu and I dont feel quite as productive in it yet, lots of little nagging issues with installing stuff and hardware support which I havent had with ubuntu for a long time.

dlokshin 15 years ago |

Not to add to a bevy of positive reviews for Lenovo, but the quality of these laptops is just so far above the rest. And I found driver support for them to be excellent with Ubuntu. Pretty much everything worked out of the box.

My T30 recently died after six years of excellent service and I switched to an Asus to save $200. I have regretted that decision more than I can tell you. Ubuntu has taken endless tweaking to get working, keyboard buttons started falling off after only a year, plastic moldings are pealing off, touchpad is of poor quality, and I could go on. Do yourself a favor and buy a Lenovo, the quality is outstanding.

If you choose to go the MBP route, it does come with its own problems. Take a hard drive failure, for example. 20+ screws to remove the thing and replace it. You basically have to take the entire bottom apart. On a lenovo, unscrew a single screw, run whatever processes you can on it to save your data, and pop a new one in.

nl 15 years ago |

I've just bought a cheap Acer 4741G (something like that anyway?) to run as my dev machine with Ubuntu.

It's not exactly a high-end machine, but my logic went like this:

1) 15" is too big, 13.3" is too small. This is a 14.3" widescreen, which seems perfect.

2) Decent, if not outstanding specs. i5 430M processor, 4G RAM, 500GB HD. (Most Google results are for an i3 version, but it seems the newer ones are i5)

3) Cheap enough (< $800) that spending extra to get a SSD to use as my boot drive makes sense (arriving today).

4) Has an internal DVD drive, which I'm going to replace with a drive caddy and the original 500GB HD.

5) It even has a dedicated (NVidia 310M) video card. I'm not a gamer, but CUDA support might be fun to play with.

I haven't installed Ubuntu yet, but I did boot it off a USB and all the hardware seems ok.

The disadvantages:

1) Low battery life. It's only a small, 6 cell battery and lasts 3-4 hours. This isn't a huge issue for me ATM.

2) Screen resolution is 1366x768. This looks fine on a 13.3", but on the 14" a little higher might be nice.

3) Not as nice looking as a MacBook Pro

jagbolanos 15 years ago |

I have developed with several laptops and several Linux flavors during the years.

But I will certainly recommend the Dell Studio 15 + Ubuntu.

Drivers work without problems (just a small step to take with the wifi) and is quite stable. My partners that own MPB had problems with theirs during this time, plus if the need to have a presentation they need to carry additional HW.

sonnym 15 years ago |

I've been using an HP dv6113us for ~4 years now, with every version of openSUSE through that time span working without any deal breaking problems.

When the laptop was brand new, I had some problems with the sound drivers, but contacted someone working on a patch for ALSA and was able to test it out before it was merged. Broadcom wireless is easy on openSUSE as a script is provided, but that should be a solved problem for Ubuntu as well; NVIDIA caused some problems which were easily resolved by installing the proprietary drivers. Today it seems that Nouveau is far enough along to function as a replacement for the proprietary drivers.

That said, the laptop was a gift and were the choice mine, I would probably go with a Thinkpad.

misterm 15 years ago |

check out http://www.linuxcertified.com/, I got a decent laptop from there for pretty cheap. I am very happy with it. They come preloaded with your choice of linux distro, including the ubuntu option.

etherael 15 years ago |

Have used 3 Asus systems in the past 6 months, none of them were dumped as bad machines, merely changing requirements;

Asus UL80vt; Extremely good battery life, quite good performance, initially had a problem with the hybrid graphics setup between the integrated intel and discrete nvidia but stock 10.04 worked fine on this, the only catch was the ath9k chipset for wifi, which although it did work would randomly drop out and require a reboot for reconnection, switching to the preempt kernel line fixes this issue.

Asus N71JQ; Good middle of the road system bang for buck wise, ATI drivers were significantly shakier than Nvidia, but not enough to dissuade me from ATI entirely in future purchases, exact same problem with the ath9k chipset as with the ul80vt.

Asus G73Jh; Ridiculously awesome performance and the hybrid drives on the system make this perform significantly better than even desktop 7200rpm drives (at least for read), the cost is significantly lower than even a mid range MBP and you simply cannot get these specs on an MBP at any price. The drawback is that the video card is past the bleeding edge that is gracefully handled by the stock fglrx drivers from ATI.

I spent days first fixing this in ubuntu 10.04 by manually patching kernel driver files and rebuilding the fglrx modules myself, followed by this being broken a month later when upstream went ahead and fixed the same problem in a different way, resulting in extensive maintenance to push out the conflicting fglrx mods. That said, this issue should actually be fixed as of the present 10.04 release and the double dose of pain I got may have been an artefact of my specific case. If this is really the case this is an awesome development rig. The only other drawback is that old ath9k chestnut, same fix as required for the other two mentioned model, the preempt line of kernels fixes this.

The only other issue affecting all three systems is that the touchpad freeze function does not work without extensive kernel level messing around and I couldn't be bothered to go that far to fix what I felt to be a minor issue (it was most pronounced on the ul80vt due to the size relative to my enormous hands and least on the G73jh for the same reason).

kunalb 15 years ago |

I've tried Ubuntu on a C series Vaio (long time back) which pretty much died on me a hardware failure at a time within 2 years and right now am using a 15'' HP Probook (4510s) which runs Ubuntu like a dream. The ATI drivers are picked up directly and the only issues that I've run into involve screen brightness screwing up after suspend/resume -- HP seems to be able to support Ubuntu really well.

This laptop didn't cost that much -- around $1000 but the build quality isn't that good -- though the keyboard is excellent (with a numpad).

As a side note -- the best solution seems to be getting a MBP and then running Ubuntu virtually for development and OSX stuff for everything else.

ahi 15 years ago |

I used to have a Thinkpad, but the battery/power connector kept crapping out on me. I'm not convinced Lenovo has maintained the commitment to quality. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I currently use a (copy/paste from newegg) Gateway NV59C57U Intel Core i5 450M(2.40GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 NoteBook

Was only $650 and runs Mint (Ubuntu derivative) just fine. Only problem with it is that the trackpad sucks, but why would you be using the trackpad when you spend all your time in vim? In short, it's plenty fast and since it's a third the price of an MBP there's no guilt in buying a new laptop every year.

enduser 15 years ago |

I bought a Toshiba Portege r705 (13") last weekend and run Linux (ArchLinux) on it exclusively. The only issue I have had with it is that backlight control goes away after resuming from a suspend. Everything else works flawlessly, and the laptop is vastly superior compared to a Macbook Pro as far as what you get for your dollar.

$780 at Best Buy for 3.0lbs, 2.4GHz Core i3, 4GB, 500GB 5400RPM drive, dual-layer DVD writer, SD slot, HDMI and VGA out, eSATA port, built-in 4G (Linux-compatible with mainline kernel drivers), chiclet keyboard similar to Macbooks, 13" 1366x768 display (glossy but less glossy than a Macbook).

Get a ThinkPad if you want to spend more.

bitwize 15 years ago |

ThinkPad X or T series. Booyaka.

coderholic 15 years ago |

I have ubuntu on a Dell Latitude. Highly recommended. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/latitude-e6410/pd?refid=la...

cjbprime 15 years ago |

I'd normally recommend a ThinkPad, but they've been pretty disappointing lately. Two very recent experiences:

T410s:

* sound doesn't work in latest Ubuntu, need a kernel update for a new PCI ID.

* battery charge percentage goes from 0-10%, where 10% is "full". Apparently the embedded controller decided to change which units it reports current in.

T510:

* black screen when booting Fedora or Ubuntu installers. Caused by lack of drivers for the embedded DisplayPort connection to the LCD panel.

* display backlight brightness controls don't work

* suspend doesn't work, because it has a USB3 controller which fails to suspend, because the upstream kernel doesn't have any suspend/resume support for USB3 controllers yet.

Sigh.

mgedmin 15 years ago | |

This is often the story with the latest hardware: you have to wait 6 months for it to be supported in Linux :(

When I got my T61, the current Ubuntu (breezy, IIRC) didn't run on it. I installed the alpha of the upcoming version (gutsy) and it kind of limped along; all the newer versions worked just fine out of the box.

simonjoe 15 years ago |

+1 for Apples. I have run virtual machines in the past when necessary, but I find that I don't do it anymore as there isn't any software I have to use right now that doesn't run natively. OS X has a few decent package managers, though none as good as apt-get or portage, so that might be a concern if you're used to that kind of thing. If you're not aware that the software you mentioned is available for OS X and specifically mentioned ubuntu, i'm willing to bet that's not the case…but I have a bad image of ubuntu users, mostly because I used gentoo back when I was on linux.

slantyyz 15 years ago | |

Lately, instead of running Linux in a VM, I've been messing with EC2 micro instances. At .02/h, it's fairly inexpensive, and the load isn't on your own machine.

tnorthcutt 15 years ago |

I recently purchased an HP Envy 14, and really like it. It's quite similar to a MBP from a hardware standpoint - hi resolution screen, aluminum case, fairly lightweight, overall great build quality. I don't run Ubuntu on mine, but from reading this blog post: http://thewaffletech.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/ubuntu-10-04-o... it sounds like it runs it pretty well. Possibly some minor issues that may be resolved with 10.10.

aidenn0 15 years ago | |

Hi resolution screen? I've come to associate the macs with low-resolution screen. You can't get 1920x1200 unless you go up to 17" I'm used to getting it as an option on 15" laptops

tnorthcutt 15 years ago | | |

My mistake, I assumed 1280x768 or 1280x800 was typical for a 15" laptop. I thought 1680x1050 (MBP) and 1600x900 (E14) were considered high resolution.

megamark16 15 years ago |

I use a MBP at work and I'm not really a huge fan. I find the interface requires that I use the mouse way to often, and I have to know all Apple's special key combinations to get anything done. I spend most of my time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, and I wish I were booting Ubuntu natively, but I just haven't had time get it working correctly. I am also in the market for a new dev machine for personal use, and I'm leaning heavily towards a Thinkpad, just based on what I've heard around the Linux community.

bradleyland 15 years ago | |

> I find the interface requires that I use the mouse way to often, and I have to know all Apple's special key combinations to get anything done

If you expect to get anything done without using the mouse, knowing all the "special key combinations" is a pre-requisite for any OS. I hate to be the kool-aid drinker that jumps to Apple's defense, but I hear a lot of complaints about OS X keyboard accessibility that simply aren't true. A single checkbox enables access to "all controls" through your keyboard. It's turned of by default because, frankly, most people don't use the keyboard. I do, but my computer is my instrument.

robgough 15 years ago | | |

It took me over two years to find that checkbox, as I didn't know to look for it.

Not being able to dismiss a dialog box with the keyboard was driving me mad.

System Prefs>Keyboard>Keyboard Shortcuts>"All Controls"

qjz 15 years ago | | |

I'm a keyboard junkie (using Vimperator right now), but OSX still has a few brick walls when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. For example, there are no built-in shortcuts to move/resize/maximize the current window. This is pretty basic stuff, but I have to reach for the mouse to do it.

megamark16 15 years ago | | |

Wow, none of my mac using coworkers told me about this, through all my complaints about not being able to use the keyboard in dialogs (escape, spacebar, enter, arrow keys, seriously?). You may have just solved most of my problems. Thanks!

I'm still getting a ThinkPad for personal development projects, but my work laptop just became much more usable.

fauigerzigerk 15 years ago | | |

Have you found out how to get Linux/Windows Alt+Tab behaviour on OS X? It's one of those things that slows me down 10% whenever I'm on a Mac.

ze_dude 15 years ago |

I've been using a Dell XPS 1530 with an SSD, and couldn't be happier.

All the stuff I've tried worked out of the box (built-in wireless, webcam, sound, graphics card w/ NVidia driver, etc).

It's a great laptop and the SSD and 4 Ggis of RAM make coding much more enjoyable.

As a side note, it takes 5-10 seconds to boot into Kubuntu from a complete shutdown (i.e. not suspend-to-disk), whereas it takes over 45 seconds to get into Vista (on the same laptop)... And Windows isn't starting up database and web servers.

So if you want to get a PC, definitely look into the XPS 1530.

macco 15 years ago |

Please do Linux a favor and buy a preinstalled: ZaReason, System76.

Their machines work great with Ubuntu - unlike many laptops from other vendors.

And yes, you get all the software you'll need - it's Debian at least.

maco 15 years ago | |

wow, our usernames are similar... but yes, +1 for ZaReason. I have two of their systems. The company is a pleasure to deal with.

davidw 15 years ago |

Dell occasionally has systems for sale without Windows, or with Linux preinstalled:

http://www.dell.com/ubuntu

khandelwal 15 years ago | |

I'm hoping to avoid Dell. Their laptops (at least the ones I've been familiar with) seem to have poor build quality.

dagw 15 years ago | | |

Dell's older laptops used to be pretty horrible, but they've made significant improvements and their latest line of higher end business laptops are pretty darn nice.

joezydeco 15 years ago | | |

Using a Dell Latitude E6500 and it's pretty solid. Lots of metal.

starbuckt 15 years ago | | |

Their business laptops (at least the latitudes) are really good. I'd even say that they are better than Thinkpads, but YMMV.

davidw 15 years ago | | |

I've had decent luck with mine. I did splurge for the extra warranty coverage, so the one time I did have a broken drive, I had a guy at my door (in Innsbruck, Austria) the next morning with a new drive.

mithaler 15 years ago | | |

I use a Dell XPS 15-inch with Ubuntu, and I've had a few cosmetic issues but nothing that impaired functionality. Overall I'm quite happy with it and would recommend it to the OP.

retube 15 years ago | | |

Seconded. I had a Dell, admittedly a low-end one, and it was dreadful. Crummy build, large pixel size, a ton of bloatware (not that that's relevant if you're going to put linux on it). And the wi-fi under Ubuntu was extremely flaky.

lkozma 15 years ago |

Lenovo SL510 here: picked it up for ~ 400 euros with FreeDOS, installed Ubuntu, everything worked out of the box. I use it for all development.

Dmunro 15 years ago |

I have this at work: http://www.system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=28&produc...

Just upgraded to 10.10 and everything works just as expected (provided you've installed the System76 drivers), including wifi and the webcam. It really is a beast too, performance-wise, with 8 cores and 4 gigs of ram.

adamkittelson 15 years ago |

I can recommend System76 if you go the Ubuntu route. My desktop at home is a System76 Leopard Extreme that I dual boot Ubuntu / Windows, and prior to getting my MBP I was using a Pangolin Performance laptop.

Since getting a MBP I can say that I do prefer OSX to Ubuntu, but I'm a Ruby/Rails dev surrounded by other Apple guys using Textmate so it's the path of least resistance for me for sure.

mcxx 15 years ago |

I use an Asus UL-30 and recommend it - great keyboard and touchpad, long battery life, lightweight, good display, no problems with Ubuntu.

jzawodn 15 years ago | |

The touchpad drives me nuts on that machine. :-(

Thankfully I have a Thinkpad 410s replacing it tomorrow.

erikwiffin 15 years ago | | |

I have a UL-30 and the wildly sensitive touchpad is my only complaint.

I love the keyboard, battery life, and how light it is. It performs more than well enough for web development, web browsing, video watching.

anonymous245 15 years ago |

No, the experience on the MBP is not so much better as to warrant getting it for development.

IMHO, it's worse. My biggest gripes: (1) built-in terminal doesn't do fullscreen, (2) built-in terminal doesn't have easy way to emulate different keyboards (tmux requires function keys behave like xterm).

BUT the iApps are SWEET. iPhoto/iMovie are rocking my world.

I say this as a recent dabbler in Mac.

marcocampos 15 years ago |

While I love Thinkpads and was going to buy a T410 I end up buying a HP Elitebook 8440p. It's sturdy as Lenovo laptops, all Intel hardware (not having to worry about crappy ATI/NVIDIA graphics drivers) and it comes with a kick-ass 14" 1600x900 LED backlit LCD.

Installed Ubuntu 10.10 yesterday. Everything worked, all hardware works correctly. Couldn't be happier. :)

ianb 15 years ago |

Like many people running Linux I also have a Thinkpad (T400). It works okay, but it still has some significant issues. The specific things I have problems with:

* Sleep; unlike some previous experiences the laptop does pretty reliably come back after sleep, but it's slow to wake up and the experience feels crude. The locked screen login screen for instance requires a keypress, and then another second before you can actually enter the password making it easy to leave out the first character of your password. I'd remove it entirely but I can't find a preference for that.

* Automatic sleep via closing the screen is a pain, primarily because of the slowness. If you regret having closed the laptop (i.e., you forgot just one thing) then you open it up only to see it pokily trying to sleep, waiting, and trying to wake it up. I've resorted to turning off all automatic sleeping, which also causes lots of problems but at least is predictable.

* External monitors work great now, they've finally figured that out (at least with the video hardware in a Thinkpad; though it seems generally good these days). Still it's tweaky and annoying. I run a lot with two monitors, and everytime I reconnect I have to tweak the settings and go through a little dance to avoid bugs in screen layout (connect monitor, orientation is wrong, mirror screens, apply, unmirror, rearrange, fix resolutions, apply). With my previous Dell laptop I had to logout to connect a screen, so at least it's better.

* Sometimes when I go into suspend it fails. So I'll tuck my laptop away, not wanting to wait 20 seconds to see if it successfully slept, and then later realize my backpack is hot because it's running full speed in there.

* Battery life is poor. One cool feature of Thinkpads is you can remove the DVD drive and replace it with a battery. This takes a long time to charge, but it's cool (and hotswapping works great, in case I want the DVD drive). Still I only get a couple hours of battery life. When I've tried to apply tweaks to improve battery life I've broken things or disabled hardware.

* Wireless is not reliable in more complex setups, e.g., sometimes WPA doesn't work.

* Sometimes wireless doesn't come back after going into airplane mode.

* The hardware has good and bad parts. The physical build quality is unimpressive. The dock is nice, and only available with a couple kinds of laptops (Thinkpad, Dell... not sure what else?) The speakers are passable, about the same as a Macbook. You don't need a dongle for a VGA monitor, but you need a dock to do DVI. It's not terribly hot. The Mac screens are definitely better. I like the mouse nipple, but the touchpad on a Mac is way better than the Thinkpad's touchpad. Three mouse buttons, very nice for Linux. The camera works, video chat works, bluetooth works, and probably a bunch of other things that wouldn't be givens a few years ago on Linux.

I would seriously consider a laptop specifically designed for Linux (like System76; someone tweeted me another one a while ago but stupid Twitter doesn't let me look back to old replies). But it feels weird because I've never known someone who personally has such a laptop. And it's very hard to trust someone who says "Linux works great on X" because there are a lot of people who have a very low standard of what "great" means.

_jz 15 years ago |

I got a MBP a frew years ago as a gift/compensation for some free lance work. I've been battling trigger point pain for the past 4 years and the MBP keyboard is the most comfortable laptop keyboard I have found for me. Everyone is different but this is something you may want to consider since most laptops will run a form of *nix.

niels 15 years ago |

Thinkpad X series (or T410). By far the best.

tvon 15 years ago |

After ~8 years with Linux as my desktop OS I moved to OSX in '06 and have been very happy. My unibody MBP is by far the nicest laptop I've ever owned or used... I do web development with Django for a living, so it sounds like you'd use the same tools.

But, to each their own...

sushi 15 years ago |

I use Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 1525 and it serves my purpose well but because I also have to use Photoshop a lot I have Windows in partition.

I will die out of joy the day Photoshop comes to Ubuntu. That is the ONLY reason I have Windows installed.

twymer 15 years ago |

Edit: I need to learn to read better.

I've never used System76 but saw them at a recent Linux fest. Seemed like very quality machines: actually have their logo as part of the case and windows key replaced with an Ubuntu key (neither are stickers).

midnightmonster 15 years ago |

I had a macbook but found I preferred my Linux desktop. I ended up giving the macbook to my wife. I'm thinking about getting another mac for iPad development, but I still expect to do everything else on my Ubuntu machine.

ashitvora 15 years ago |

I am loving my Mac. But if you have budget constraints, I would suggest Ubuntu. I was using Ubuntu before I switched to Mac and I was loving it too.

You can get almost all the softwares on Ubuntu which you get on Mac OSx.

mgedmin 15 years ago |

I would go with a T or X series ThinkPad with Intel graphics and Ubuntu.

I've seen a team of Python web developers with MacBook Pros. They all used Ubuntu virtual machines for the actual development.

mbubb 15 years ago |

Hello

My HP 6510b has run every version of Ubuntu since 8.04. I put a 12 cell travel battery on it when I travel so it is a bit heavy. 4GB RAM. Usually run xfce. I am a sysadmin so often have a handful of xterms open and VirtualBox running XP for vSphere, etc. chrome open with HN in the background. Jabber session or two.

I really cannot say enough about this laptop. Not pretty at all but durable.

Everything works - except the fingerprint reader which I have never cared about to get to work.

It has been great. Currently am on Ubuntu 10.10/ xfce. Have used this laptop since 2007 - initially had Win2k on it.

the current incarnation is the 6550b: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13616_ca/13616...

  My lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)

00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)

00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)

00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)

02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b6)

02:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 02)

10:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)

18:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)

swah 15 years ago |

For me the three OSes feel like this:

- Windows: snappy until it fucks up, best fonts, Flash runs perfectly, you feel mainstream, pragmatic - Linux: great support for developing, ugly fonts and lousy hardware support, you feel a hacker - MacOS: Youtube makes the MBP hot, never need to boot again, just close/open the lid, good looking apps, you feel modern and cool

cskau 15 years ago | |

Actually I think Ubuntu has made a good push in the fonts area - especially as of lately. The repos contains installers for (all?) the Windows fonts plus they just launched a brand new Ubuntu font which IMHO looks great. The Ubuntu repos are literally stuffed with fonts.

narrator 15 years ago |

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-SR520G. Everything Ubuntu-wise works perfectly.

dangrossman 15 years ago |

HP Envy 14. It's the MacBook Pro of PCs.

vdoma 15 years ago |

Lenovo Thinkpad FTW

gcb 15 years ago |

Eeepc 1000.

No noise sad.

Truly portable.

5h plus battery

Do not heat your lap.

Got last year for 300. Amazon has now for 700 :(

And most important. It does not have CPU to run things like silly flash games :)

qjz 15 years ago | |

What model? I have a 1000HE. Its portability and battery life are great for travel, but its form factor makes it painful for development (without an external monitor/keyboard/mouse).

gcb 15 years ago | | |

the pure 1000. i think it's the only one with ssd... never cared much for the others.

it's ok for running vim. :)

acconrad 15 years ago |

01010100 00111101

The end.

nightlifelover 15 years ago |

Macbook pro, because Linux on a laptop sucks balls.

technomancy 15 years ago | |

2003 called, it wants its stereotypes back.

cskau 15 years ago |

Nobody /needs/ a MacBook Pro. They're just fancy toys. Spend half the money on an inexpensive brand and get the same laptop. Linux will run on anything ( literally! ), so just buy the laptop that fits you the best, and don't worry too much about the rest.

Personally I've been developing on a modest 10' ASUS eee PC for years. Ubuntu loaded with all of the above and much more have been no problem at all. Lately I've been considering replacing it for the new 12' model though, since both the keyboard and the mousepad buttons are beginning to show wear from using it so much.

slantyyz 15 years ago | |

Are you serious?

Macbook Pros are premium notebooks in the exact same way high end Thinkpads are. The price between a Macbook Pro and any other high end notebook is competitive.

With an inexpensive brand, you're getting inferior screens and flimsy plastic bodies. The specs might line up on paper, but that's as naive an approach to comparing hardware as you can get. Buying based on a flimsy spec checklist versus matching up the device to your real-world requirements is going to result in a great deal of buyer remorse.

If you're a road warrior, the last thing you want is a laptop with a flimsy body and weak solder points on the ports. If you are using your laptop as your only screen, you don't want to be spending >= 8h a day looking at a cheapass LCD.

Just like you don't see professional carpenters using dollar store tools, as a professional developer, you need to invest in quality hardware - regardless of the brand.