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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

There are other nice machines to run Linux on.

AFAICT people buy Apple laptops to run macOS; for that you have pretty little choice.

For a while a Macbook was the best Windows laptop. Not sure if that's still true.

IMHO it's still up there. I don't know about the new ones, but I had a 2015 at my previous place of employment and Windows 10 on BootCamp is a very nice experience. I still haven't seen a laptop from "PC manufacturers" that comes close. I haven't physically used a SurfaceBook though.

The surface is nice, but it's a very different experience from the older, more solid macbook hardware. Most of the complaints about the new directions for macbook hardware (too light, not enough material, weird inconsistencies, and sacrificed keyboard mechanics) also appear on the Surface

The Surface Pro, yep - the Surface Book on the other hand has pretty nice keyboard, and a fantastic track pad (just as good as that in MBPs). My partner owns one (after I recommended it) - they're great laptops... and tablets to boot!

That's for recent models then? When I had it (around 4 years ago) it was ok, but lacking on the driver front: fans were running high for seemingly no reason, battery life was worse than under OSX even when idling (could be windows itself though I doubt it) and one of the drivers would write meaningless messages to the debug log like every single second.

Until recently, at my job, the choices were rather underpowered Windows machine or MBP. That was mostly because it was HR-types that chose Windows. I spend 98% of my time in Linux on my MBP and only spin it up which I have to use the camera or a OSX only app.

But I've been installing Linux on my work macs for a while, this kind of lag is totally expected.

At one point Linus's machine of choice was a Macbook Air.

Linus probably had easier time handling incompatibilities with the hardware. Most of us are not such proficient Linux hackers.

It seems to be pretty well supported:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook

Can you recommend a good Linux-compatible laptop.

I saw that Dell no longer sells Linux pre-installed on its XPS machines.

What are some good alternatives?

I'm very happy with my System76. (I have an galago ultrapro - they don't make them anymore but still provide support). They used to have pretty bad reviews, but most if not all the people/colleagues I've asked are now happy about their purchase. YMMV.

If I were to buy a laptop to run Ubuntu on today I'd go for their Lemur.

Disclaimer: I work for Canonical.

EDIT: Dell seems to sell their XPS 13 with Ubuntu still? Not sure what you meant: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?newt...

Ah, I see the first mention of Ubuntu was far down the page, long after all the machine specs which only show Windows. Thanks for pointing that out. I wonder what the community feels about these XPS linux boxes.

What a strange site. It mentioned Ubuntu at the bottom, but when you go to customize and order a machine, Ubuntu is not an option.

Strangely, it depends on the amount of RAM you choose.

My choice is consistently ThinkPad T series. This, among other things, was one of the machines Google supplied to their engineers as a Linux laptop.

The high-resolution screen story of these laptops is somehow underwhelming. OTOH a matte screen by default is priceless; I can withstand a full HD 14" screen pretty well. Especially because X has much better font anti-aliasing for smaller fonts than OSX, so my Emacs and terminal windows look more readable even with lower DPI.

A Thinkpad series T is not sleek, but I don't care. I care about the ability to cram a lot of battery power into it, though.

VirtualBox works fairly well. Not that I would want to use it as a primary desktop environment that way.

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