Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

111 pointskhandelwal272 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?

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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.]

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.

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?

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.

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.

You mean un-unix or un-linux?

Which parts?

That's a fair statement. I think there were two big ones: - the service registry/init system - filesystem paths

The second is minor in the grand scheme of things. It only affects my user account but the first one was greatly annoying. My history is in AIX/HP-UX before going Linux full time so I'm familiar with the smit/sam model of doing things but have you ever tried to actually usea traditional unix/linux model for managing apache in the default OSX install? What about LDAP? It's weird and annoying. Launchd? Seriously?

The Mac I have is in the living room for family use so I have not "worked" a lot on it. I didn't use much of the default tools and relied more on macports for unix stuff. I was asking because I am considering a Mac to replace the windows laptop with cygwin I use for dev. I use Linux for servers but I am from the world of Solaris I also had HP and Irix workstations at different jobs in the past and a NeXT at home.

I know the defaults are all Linux oriented these days so any different flavor of unix is always a little extra work if the filesystem differs to much. Macports also adds a little twist to that.

I found launchd verbose (and the xml is not even that self descriptive) and I am not sure its worth the departure from the usual way of doing things but I didn't think it was so bad. I only did a few simple things anyway.

These seem like things I don't rely on too much on a dev laptop anyway. But I now believe I have to investigate a bit more before I buy the new machine. Thanks

In my case I find myself fullscreening a vm if I can't change to base install. I have too much muscle memory that I can't implement on other os:

Cmd-t new terminal Cmd-w new browser Cmd-e new vim session Cmd-f new file manager window

Then I have my ctrl-shift keybinds for terminator and my vim keybinds. I'm especially unproductive without the cmd-t option available and the terminator keybinds.

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.

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.

Can you be more specific? As in, why not install your preferred host OS, be it windows or some flavor of linux, and run virtual box on top anyway?

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?

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.

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. )

You can turn the copying files "feature" off. Still annoying. I also hate iTunes.

The Venn diagram of (people who like iTunes, people who like mpd* ) would look like two circles, separated by hundreds of miles of barren tundra. That's like the intersection between plumbers and meerkats.

* Self included. Lua mpd library, FWIW: http://github.com/silentbicycle/lua-mpd

On one hand there's DJ Pirate, on the other there's Apple Remote. I'm not a fan of iTunes, but for me Remote is a big win.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/remote/id284417350?mt=8

> When I import my music folder, iTunes copies all the files to it's own private directories,

This is optional and IIRC, not on by default.

I have to add:

> Thanks, but my music is already arranged the way I like.

This just baffles me. Why would you ever manually arrange your music? I used to do this when I use Linux because I basically had to if I wanted to browse it in any sane way, but I much prefer having some app do it for me. It just strikes me as one of the many things that my computer can do well, so it should do it.

> 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 have no clue about non-macs (iTunes generally sucks in Windows IMO) so I can't really help, but in OSX if you have the codec installed, it will work.

> I enjoy controlling my music from a phone/tablet/other computer.

Google around, there are a lot of remotes for iTunes (free one from Apple for iOS, one for android here: http://dacp.jsharkey.org/).

iTunes is one of the main things that I'd miss if I switched to Linux full-time.

It is more or less automatically arranged (by grip). I make the occasional tweak when grip screws up. As far as browsing goes, mpd supports all of that based on file metadata. Having a filesystem arrangement under my control is useful for this purpose:

    $ cp /misc/music/Johnny_Cash/American*/* /media/generic_non_ipod_music_player/

Since I have more music than normally fits on a portable player, this step is unavoidable (I can't just copy everything over).

(Actually there is another step involved since I store music as lossless flac files, which most portables don't play. See http://github.com/stucchio/Mp3FS for details.)

> Having a filesystem arrangement under my control is useful for this purpose:

> $ cp /misc/music/Johnny_Cash/American/ /media/generic_non_ipod_music_player/

Why can't you do this with iTunes' automatic arrangement? What am I missing?

I've found that iTunes organizes music in a very reasonable way > 90% of the time. Added benefit: When I add title/album/artist metadata (say it was missing or incorrect when I imported it into iTunes), the hierarchy and filenames automatically rearrange and rename themselves, no intervention on my part required.

    $ cp /misc/music/Johnny_Cash/American*/* /media/generic_non_ipod_music_player/

You lose me there. Why would you want to manually copy individual directories to your music player? How do you handle playlists, or worse, smart playlists?

I'd go insane if I had to manually move files over like this.

    $ cp_playlist.py countryfun /media/non_ipod_player <Tab> <Enter>

As I said, I can't sync iTunes to my mp3 player since a) it's not an iPod due to this anti-feature http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1202 and b) my music doesn't fit.

Some people like to manually arrange files they way they'd like to. Like, for example, many of us developers. It's fine that some people don't want to, and I don't think it means much beyond personal preferences; but it isn't exactly astounding that developers might sometimes feel plenty comfortable manipulating files manually.

Besides, yes, it's easier than people think moving files around via command. And when I do it by command, I know what I did, so I can see what happened, and it's all under my control.

I'll say that it's not perfect, but there have been pretty big improvements since 2007. Just turn off the option to copy files into a new iTunes location(I think it prompts for this upon first load) and it's a pretty solid player.

The lack of FLAC is indeed a pain in the ass though.

You forgot the part where it takes two hours to properly import 30GB of music on a fresh install of the OS. And then it forgets the index if you use a non standard location. And then it forgets it again. And then you delete iTunes and use Doubletwist.

Then you find out it sucks too and you wish for rhythmbox or amarok.

Do you really think that poor support for non-standard music library locations is a legitimate complaint? What's so horribly wrong with ~/Music/iTunes as the location for your iTunes music library?

I had a macbook with an 80gb HD, and a music collection that was about 400gb. I suppose I could have configured ~/Music/iTunes as an NFS mountpoint. But why bother with this when iTunes won't play my ogg or flac files?

iTunes already has a solution for this: shared libraries. It's much, much easier to configure than NFS, and it's fully supported. Why do you demand the ability to reinvent the wheel?

(Also, iTunes will play ogg files if you install the Xiph codecs for QuickTime. This has been the case since at least 2006, and you've stated that you last used iTunes in 2007, so I suspect you're not even trying to be fair in your criticism of iTunes, which is a shame given that there are plenty of real problems with it.)

As far as I'm aware, shared libraries only allows me to share with another iTunes library. My fileserver is not a mac. In principle, I could have screwed around with some linux server that attempts to convince iTunes it is a real mac. Or, somewhere in the preferences, I could have told iTunes not to copy to the local folder, and just run it off NFS.

In principle, I could have hacked my way around most of iTunes shortcomings. I freely admit that I didn't try very hard to do so since I saw little advantage in it.

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?

To me the Macbook's boot time feels the same as my Ubuntu (or even Windows) machines' boot times. But I never compared them on equal hardware, or even did any proper timings.

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.

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/).

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.

MacPorts and Fink both annoy me. Not because they are bad but because they are "so close but so far." I end up mostly compiling stuff manually and managing /usr/local with GNU Stow. Which is frustrating because so many mac installers seem to want to install stuff into /usr/local. I've learned to unpack the installer and install it manually so my beautiful stow-ness isn't compromised.

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.

sex packet management?

homebrew is definitely the true sound of the digital underground

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

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.

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"

Can't you just run Linux on your Macbook?

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.

Perhaps. Have you given the BSDs a try?

I'm dabbling with FreeBSD on a VM right now.

I plan to build a router/fileserver on FreeBSD at some point in the near future. ZFS looks sweet.

OK. On a grander scale, we should probably look into non-Unix operating systems more often, too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"I don't think you could do much work on a 13" screen anyways. "

I used a 12" Toshiba portege laptop as my development machine for some time, and the 1920x1200 res rocked. So much so that ever since then I made a point of getting 1920x1200 on each new laptop.

This was one reason I skipped on getting a macbook. Poor rez options, and no trackpoint mouse.

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.

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.

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.

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

right - i'm always a bit extreme :)

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.

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?

Can't you just use your own layouts on the Mac, if something about the keyboard bugs you?

(I only tried using dvorak an the Macbook, and it works fine.)

To be honest I've never tried. I use a standard UK keyboard at work and I've got a vague feeling that there'd be too much cognitive dissonance for me to learn a new layout without the right labels on the keys.

How about not learning a new layout, but just using a `normal' layout you are used to? Instead of having to get used to the Mac layout.

Sorry, I should have said: I'm talking about the UK models.

The standard layout for UK keyboards has a dedicated # key right next to the return key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#United_Kingdom

Mac keyboards for the UK - all of them, not just the laptop keyboards - omit this. I have yet to figure out why, but it's an unfortunate choice.

Is this done in hardware, or would it be possible simply to change the keyboard layout to US?

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.

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.)

Heh, I'm not a suit but I do appreciate being able to connect to a projector. Since the X201 doesn't have a CD-ROM, a docking station is basically a prerequisite IMHO.

I love my X201. It's very light but has a full size keyboard. I tend to have problems with RSS so this was a major consideration.

I went for the SSD option which I think was completely worth it. Boot of a standard Linux distribution is extremely quick (around 10s).

I would feel a lot happier with a display port and a cable for vga than the other way around. :)

Docks are incredibly underrated, and it's the one thing you'll probably never get from an Apple laptop.

If you can afford it, it's worth seriously considering buying a laptop with a minimum of 1 docking station (depends on your work situation - if you have an office and work at home, I'd suggest buying 2). They just save so much headaches and fumbling around with cords. Of the brands I've tried with docking stations (Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo) - I have found that I've had the best experience with Toshiba, and the worst with Dell.

Another nice thing about the X20x, and Thinkpads in general, is the keyboard. It's well laid out, the key action is decent, it has a handy light that actually illuminates the keys in the dark. Also, there's no optical drive, so you get a fast machine that's also seriously small -- you can pick it up by pinching the top of the screen.

Also, We had a Tandy Coco when I was a kid, I've had enough of chiclet keyboards. I'll be happy when Apple moves away from that.

Nth-ing old thinkpads. I have a t41, it's really nice. I'm going to get an t60 when (if!) it kicks the bucket. (Running OpenBSD on mine.)

I tried out a X201 and really liked it, but it has two other problems as well as the video out which were deal breakers for me:

- Low screen resolution.

- Very tall screen (especially for a 12" - due to the huge bezel) so it won't open comfortable in the back of an economy seat.

I ended up with the bottom of the range Vaio Z series instead (1600x900 res 13.3" screen that is more than an inch shorter than the X201, with HMDI and VGA out). I run Ubuntu in a VM 99.9% of the time. That setup is working really well for me and I actually like the keyboard at least as much as the IBM one.

Running Linux in VMWare player doesn't seem to be any slower in practice thanks to VT, and it has greatly improved the ease of installing, upgrading and backing up my main Linux installation. I don't even bother to back up Windows - if it goes wrong I'll just blow it away and do a clean install.

Supposedly you can get the X201 with 1440x900, but they're usually out of stock. Probably worth waiting for though, since 1200x800 is pretty weak. The X200 is easier to get in high-res, so if the screen is more important than raw horsepower that's an option too.

I can buy that this is a serious drawback for some users. Personally even at 1280x800 the pixel density is so high that I end up with my text size so large that having the extra pixels afforded by the x201s (1400x900) wouldn't buy me anything.

When I'm on the go, I'm mostly working in vim, or browsing the web. Neither of these activities stress my resolution (especially as an XMonad user). When I'm at work or home I have an external monitor that provides me with all the resolution I could ever want.

OP (or anyone else) - I saw this on slickdeals.net and decided to post here in case you decide you want one: http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2292647

Pulled the trigger on this deal after seeing the good reviews here

For the past 6 years I've used Thinkpad T40, T41 and T42s exclusively. These models tend to have solid hardware support under Linux and FreeBSD including suspend/resume and wireless.

I've come to accept the fact that every couple years I do some serious damage to my laptop, so it's a huge plus if 1) I can replace parts myself and 2) I can cheaply and easily buy a replacement laptop if the thing is totalled. Both are the case with Thinkpads. The aftermarket is still healthy, I have no problem finding T40-T42s here for about $200.

Between repairs, battery upgrades every few years, and the few times I've had to replace a laptop wholesale, my cost of ownership is probably about $200 / year.

YMMV, but I've found this setup more than adequate for coding & browsing, and have no reason to upgrade to a newer model.

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.

You cannot go wrong with a Thinkpad, but you can do better, IMHO.

I enjoyed my last Thinkpad (t40) a lot. Still have and use it after 6 years. But especially with linux, battery life wasn't very good (now the battery is completely dead of course). The fan never stopped.

To answer the question of the OP: yes, it is totally worth to learn Mac OS. First, the effort is small. Second, you will save a lot of admin time. Third, backup is easy, reliable and bootable. This alone recommends Macs as developer notebooks.

The battery part is actually true, but I thought it was only me because I use older TP models.

My girlfriend's HP gets at least half a day. I don't think she even bothers to charge it during the day.

But hers is a crap laptop with lousy, fragile keys; short screen (WTF IS THAT?) that's twice as wide than it's tall, and sucks for everything but listening to music.

Actually, it is the power management. Most likely it can be configured. But that is one of the points (admin time): you have to configure it. On Macs, it works.

Not really. Most of it is lack of proper power management in the drivers, especially graphic drivers. Work is ongoing, things will improve. In a few years.

I have only about 2--2.5 hours of battery life in my T61 under Ubuntu (standard 6-cell battery, 3 years old). Luckily that's sufficient for my needs.

I loved my T41p. It was so pleasant to use that it became my main workstation. Unfortunately, the battery stopped holding a decent charge and the fan stopped completely. Since Macs were growing in popularity, I needed one for testing, so I made the switch to a 17" MBP. It was rough at first (I really miss the pointing stick, extra trackpad buttons, and the incredible range of the hinge on the T41p), but after three years, I'm still impressed by the design and quality of the MBP. Most other laptops seem old and clunky by comparison. As for Linux development, VMWare or VirtualBox allow you to run multiple distributions and you can back up images for easy restoration. As for common open source tools on the Mac itself, MacPorts has the essentials and more.

I was a TrackPoint junkie until I got myself a unibody Macbook Pro. That was the first trackpad I actively enjoyed using, and now I honestly wouldn’t want to go back.

My T61 has both, and I use them about equally often.

My sister's Dell has a touchpad that's basically unusable.

I just bought a ThinkPad T510. What caused me to convert was the advertised EIGHT HOUR battery life. Yes, it's true. Under moderate load you can expect to get maybe six or seven; under heavy load maybe four. But that's not bad. Better than many netbooks and this is a full-sized laptop.

Just wondering, is this under Linux or Windows? And what version? Thanks in advance.

One data point: running Ubuntu on my T510 I don't get anywhere near eight hours with the standard battery - at least not with wifi on. However, I haven't done any battery life tweaking (powertop etc), and it probably doesn't help that I have the higher-res 1920x1080 screen (which I assume chews up battery, but I wouldn't give up for anything).

However, I got the backup battery as well (it plugs in over the top of the normal battery) - it pretty much triples the battery life. It's heavy as hell, but if you're going to be in one place for a while (at home, on a long-haul flight, etc) that's not a problem.

Arch Linux, no desktop (just a bare window manager with xterms, emacs, and stuff), and I turned the screen brightness down to the lowest comfortable level.

Earlier power-saving technologies were pretty proprietary from what I recall; there was "pre-ACPI" and also a fairly substantial period of "ACPI that still only worked through Windows because Windows could tolerate a lot of errors in the ACPI tables where Linux actually believed the tables". Now most of them are through standardized interfaces and work in Linux just fine.

My Thinkpad had ACPI.

But - no offense meant - this is the standard answer, if something does not work. Just upgrade. You do that 20 times, and then you get something that works now, and not after the next upgrade.

For Linux, I personally separate the issues into two issues: "Hardware support is possible but doesn't exist", and "hardware support is impossible because the hardware vendor or standards bodies are either withholding documentation, failed to follow their own standards, or in some cases even actively fighting Linux developers". The "ACPI that only works in Windows" spent quite a lot of time in the latter case. If you had an IBM laptop that is now 6 years old, it probably fell into that category, based on the timing.

(A surprising amount of hardware fails to follow standards. I have a hard time laying the blame on Linux when that happens. I realize that as a user you may not care, but assigning blame to the proper entities is important if you want it to be fixed; cussing out Linus when in fact the hardware vendors are deliberately withholding specs may feel good but is not productive otherwise.)

Alright, point taken. A valid remark.

Unfortunately "just fine" isn't nearly as fine as Windows or OS X. It just gets hotter and drains the battery faster. That's my only gripe left with Linux hardware support on my current laptops.

T410 here, after a long stint with a T41. It's a solid, solid machine.

And it has channels in it that will drain liquids spilled on it away from components and through little holes in the body! I have not, and do not intend to test this.

My MBP went through the window of my car when I rolled it 4 times. Still works great.

One thing people say about Apple products is you pay a premium for the same hardware. I was talking to a friend and told him about a few unique bits of Apple Hardware.

1) The touchpad. There's a reason people now use the Apple Touchpad on desktops. It works really well. 2) Battery Life. I frequently sit through 5-6 hours of class on a single battery charge. My MBP is a mid-2009. I've heard the newer MBPs last even longer. 3) The unibody. I think a few other companies do this now, but the MBP is very low profile, and is built solidly. 4) Backlit keyboard. I remember my old days of groping in the dark for various symbols and things. The backlight makes a difference.

OS aside, if I were looking for a new laptop, these are the things I would look at. CPU speed doesn't effect me nearly as much as Battery life. 4GB RAM is pretty standard these days.

As far as OS X is concerned, I develop "in the cloud". I'm a heavy Vim/gdb user, so if I need a low level environment, I've got plenty of servers I can ssh into. If it's something like Rails or Python, it works perfectly in OS X.

I don't have any experience with other laptops, but both my previous Thinkpad Z61m and my current Lenovo T500 have been great at running Linux and generally running without a problem. The only thing that really sucks are the batteries. On average they last around 18 months, so you have to take 2 * $100 for new batteries into account.

Have a T61. Very solid. Wonderful keyboard. But...horrible LCD. Now most laptop screens aren't very good (MBPs being a notable exception), but this is bad enough that it's almost unbearable if you're used to a desktop LCD or decent laptop screen. And, unfortunately, poor screen quality seems to be a Thinkpad family trait.

I've a T61 and a desktop LCD next to it (Samsung 193p+). The colour profiles are noticeably different (and I grumble about lack of just-working color correction in Linux), but I don't notice any qualitative differences.

Do you prefer glossy or matte laptop screens? Thinkpads are all matte, which makes the screen easier to read in various lighting conditions (no reflections), but makes the colours less vibrant.

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.

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.

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.

I love multitouch, but keystrokes are so much faster than using the touchpad.

Sure it depends on what task I am trying to accomplish, I should have prefaced that. If I am in the IDE I use the keyboard. But, if I am doing tasks like managing files I tend to use the pad.

Even for copying files, the keyboard is often quite a bit faster. Especially if you take the time to learn bash well.

I prefer the finder to the shell for file management.

And the joy of OS X is that you have both a polished GUI and a solid shell.

I love my TrackPoint -- zero-click copy (just select some text), one-click paste (middle-button).

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

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.

Got a T510 here (with the extra-high-res 1920x1080 display) and it's great. Everything works in Ubuntu 10.04 (I don't have any problems with suspend-to-RAM or -to-disk).

I spent a while looking into MBPs and it seems the Linux support is still fairly laughable - the latest models won't even boot it, and even the older ones require a kernel recompile to get sound working. I'd buy an MBP without hesitation if I wanted to run OS X, but not as a Linux machine with a nicer case.

Same here. I got mine about two months ago. I also installed 10.04. I love the trackpoint (the red pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard) and the mouse buttons just below the space bar (don't have to leave the keyboard to use the mouse). The only major issue that I have now is the inability to control the backlight. This seems to be due to a bad driver by nvidia [1]. The backlight controls work if you use non-nvidia drivers. This will shorten your battery charge considerably. Other than that, everything works out of the box. I use the 64-bit version.

[1] http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=150069

Yes, the backlight is the only thing that doesn't work so well. I can control the backlight - I think I had to tweak some setting that I found on Google, but I don't remember which - but its auto-darkening on inactivity is pretty broken. When I move the mouse or type a key, the screen brightens again, but only about halfway back to what it was before the auto-darken, so I then have to manually jack the brightness up each time this happens.

Hoping some new driver release will fix this some time, but it's only a minor irritation.

BTW, your link [1] seems to be broken?

I love the trackpoint. I've disabled my touchpad completely.

Yes, the forums' website is down. Here is the google cache [2]. The link [1] entitled "NVIDIA Quadro NVS 3100M on Lenovo Thinkpad T510: NVIDIA Backlight Control Causes Buzz" is the first result in the search for "t510 backlight" [3].

The issue has also made it to Canonical's launchpad [4]. The link [1] is mentioned in comment #27 [5].

[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4dJW3r_...

[3] http://www.google.com/search?q=t510+backlight

[4] Bug #562005: Backlight controls of laptops with NVIDIA NVS and Quadro FX 880M GPUs no longer function while using proprietary drivers https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr...

[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr...

Is there a particular wireless chipset I should choose that works better with Ubuntu? Options seem to be: ThinkPad bgn Wireless and then various Intel Centrino variants.

When I got mine, I had an option for "Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN". That's what I selected and it works flawlessly. I don't know about the others.

Intel wireless cards should be a safe choice.

Broadcom wireless cards ought to be avoided at all costs (except they finally saw the light and released an open driver for their latest 802.11N, yay, but likely it's not integrated in any distro yet).

I've no idea what "ThinkPad wireless" actually is.

I think the reason suspend didn't work for me was that I had the new version of Intel graphics whereas with a 510 you probably had NVidia graphics. Still, given that the new Intel graphics system had only been out for a few months when 10.04 came out I'm not really complaining too much.

I second the ThinkPad recommendation. Do some research on different models. The X301 is a lightweight option. ThinkPads are the best laptops for Linux by far. Another great thing about them is that they seem to me to be tougher and more reliable than other PC laptops like Dell or HP. I've dropped them before w/o incident, and they take a beating better than any laptop I've ever used. Also, the keyboard on a ThinkPad is an order of magnitude better than on a Dell or HP.

The 301 is pretty far out of date now, and with the X201 and X201s options doesn't make a whole lot of sense in my opinion.

Well, that was one option I mentioned because they are not cutting edge-- you can pick up one for a good price on eBay easily. The X201 series are indeed up to date, but Lenovo is currently sold out of the X201s model. Those would also be very good choices.

I love my x301 but I do agree.. it is out of date unfortunately. It was the perfect balance between the 12" and the 14" ThinkPads. My only gripe is that it's limited to 4GB. Anyone know if it's possible to exceed this limit?

A coworker of mine just got the T410s and I've gotta say I'm jealous. If I was buying a new laptop, I would go with the T410.

Speaking of longevity of the brand, my backup system is an old IBM Thinkpad T42 (circa 2004). It runs Ubunutu 10.04 fine. Sure it's not super fast, but the keyboard is still solid. The screen is a bit dim, but it always was. My next buy will be a thinkpad.

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.

Ubuntu runs hot on the MBP and will chew through your battery power even if you aren't running it in a VM. So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say? Too bad the default libraries are a pain to upgrade, trivial applications like "locate" and "wget" are missing and you'll have to manually configure stuff like page up/page down if you want the terminal to be useful.

I've had repeated issues compiling different "cross platform" applications on MacOS that compile painlessly under various Linux distributions and even Windows! So you end up being heavily reliant on "port" to install software instead of "./configure / make / make install". The last thing that drove me up the wall was a bizarre failure in statically-linking SQLite into a QT application. Every other platform worked. MacOS failed spectacularly.

If you want a Linux laptop, get a Linux laptop. I'm only on a Macbook for video editing and iPhone/iPad development. It is excellent for that and it is a beautiful machine in many ways (love the chassis), but it is not nearly as good a platform for developers as Ubuntu by any means.

This is ultimately what led me to switch from OS X to Ubuntu. Been using Ubuntu full-time since May and its great! All those headaches are gone!

What do you use for video editing? Just curious, since I have ports installed just to build kdenlive. I haven't had good luck with iMovie (crashing, poor MTS support, bloated AVHDC files, and choppy transcoding). I'm too cheap to buy Final Cut Pro, but would be interested in other options.

iMovie honestly. Don't need much and it isn't really professional-level stuff. But it is a work-related need and I don't know of anything comparable for Linux.

So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say?

I don't recall saying that it is or is not in my post above. Please don't put words in my mouth.

but it is not nearly as good a platform for developers as Ubuntu by any means

you are painting a pretty broad stroke there.

I do web and mobile development, both require application like Photoshop, professional video editing tools while web specifically Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE, Flash and a few others. For me Linux is not a superior development platform because getting some of these running is just as hacky as getting libs to work correctly on OSX. I use Netbeans as my development IDE which is available on OSX and I have to run a virtual for IE so for me OSX offers a happy middle-ground because I get iOS development while only having to trade running IE in a virtual. So while Ubuntu may be a superior development platform for what you do, it may not be for other developers. The original poster specifically highlighted web development tools. And for web development OSX offers a good value proposition. It has its frustrations just as other OS's do.

Just a heads up, you can feel perfectly confident saying that OS X is Unix. Snow Leopard is UNIX 03 certified.

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3581.htm

Sure, I was more offended by words being placed in my mouth. Whether it is UNIX or not is irrelevant to me if it does what I need it to do, I don't really get hung up in the dogma.

I think the "you" was directed hypothetically at the reader, not you specifically.

trevelyan makes some good points. I love my MBP, but consider it more of a host machine than a development machine. I do most of my development in VMs or while logged into various Linux machines. If you've never used OS X before, there are a few gotchas that can make it less suitable for cross platform development. Aside from Apple's unpredictable changes to upstream sources, my biggest complaint is the tendency of the Finder to leave turds everywhere it's been. I'm always disappointed when a vendor distributes source code with these intact (and by default, the Finder will try to write them to practically every network drive folder it visits). That's just one example of things you'll have to watch out for when you develop on the Mac.

If it was directed at a hypothetical reader, it was still implied that I represent the position that OSX = UNIX, based on the contents of my post. Which was never implied in my post.

I may have been a little too jumpy and he may have meant no harm by it, but people putting words in my mouth annoys me to no end. Many times It is used as a deception to falsely strengthen their position.

I don't know what UNIX means to you but where I come from UNIX means an atomic rename(2).

http://www.weirdnet.nl/apple/rename.html

I said specifically in my post that OS X is UNIX 03 certified.

http://www.unix.org/version3/

The Open Group owns the Unix trademark, which is what we're all referring to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Group

So I don't know what UNIX means to you, but where I come from, it's based on a certification that adheres to a defined set of standards.

What you posted is an unresolved bug report that doesn't prove or disprove that OS X is Unix certified.

I'm well aware of what UNIX 03 means. Are you? The core of it is IEEE Std 1003.1. Here's a quote from the Rationale section of the rename(2) page from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 edition:

"This rename() function is equivalent for regular files to that defined by the ISO C standard. Its inclusion here expands that definition to include actions on directories and specifies behavior when the new parameter names a file that already exists. That specification requires that the action of the function be atomic."

So to comply with the Single Unix specification, rename(2) must be atomic. The rename(2) function on OS X has been empirically shown to not be atomic. What reasonable conclusions can be drawn here?

The reasonable conclusion is that a bug exists where -- under certain circumstances -- rename(2) fails in a way that is not expected. It's a bug. It's not as if rename(2) is intentionally implemented in a way that is not atomic; it's that there is a bug. Should it be fixed? Yes. Does it mean that OS X is not Unix? No.

> Does it mean that OS X is not Unix? No.

What exactly are you arguing? What is your definition of unix? A label purchased from the Open Group or an implementation of a specification?

If it's the former, I completely agree with you, OS X is UNIX. If it's the latter, what standard of proof would it take to convince you otherwise?

Ok, I'll state it clearly. I'm arguing that:

One may feel comfortable claiming that OS X is "Unix" based on the fact that all versions of OS X since 10.5 have been "Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product" (from an archive of the Apple website), signifying that they have met the requirements for the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specification.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070823040630/http://www.apple.c...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

Relax! No-one is putting words in your mouth... this is a discussion board. The statement to which you're reacting negatively was a rhetorical flourish.... :)

My comment was in reply to your statement that you can virtualize Linux and that makes the MBP an equivalent platform, and I posted because I've gone through these issues and it wasn't fun. The MBP really isn't good for Linux because of the battery issue and then a host of other small problems (sleep, etc.) that make installing dual-boot troublesome:

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

I'm glad that you can do your web development work on Mac. They are really nice machines. But if this guy needs Ubuntu it is probably because he needs software that runs reliably on it. Knowing that Photoshop will run on the MBP isn't a great impetus to switch when you need to compile various non-default libraries, setup software that isn't packaged with port, or work with almost anything coded in C or C++. This doesn't mean that Mac isn't good at what it does. It just means that if the guy needs Linux, he shouldn't think MacOS is equivalent just because it's based on Unix.

or work with almost anything coded in C or C++

Right, and I agree 100% I would not do sys-dev on OSX unless it was OSX sys-dev. But he specifically listed an array of web-dev technologies not sys-dev and that is why I made the recommendation that a MBP would suffice. He did not mention Photoshop but I assumed if he is doing web-dev he will need it at some point unless he works with a team and has a dedicated graphics resource. Anyway, the list of technologies provided by the poster leaned heavily to the fact that he would be doing web-dev and for me the MBP works as a web-dev platform.

If he would have asked about embedded, I would have said hell no, I have suffered first hand (as a hobbyist) at the utter lack of serious PCB design software, or dev kits available on the Mac for embedded work.

And if he would have said, I want to do C dev on an open stack, I would have also said you many want to look at a Sager Notebook as opposed to a MBP.

BTW, I apologize for jumping the gun on you. I mistook the context of your wording.

There are various kinds of web-dev. OSX might be perfect for front-end development (Photoshop, HTML, CSS) while sucking for back-end development (3rd-party Python libraries with random C/C++/Fortran--NumPy, if I'm not mistaken--extensions).

I've been using Macs as my development machines since before Darwin became OSX and that's the only thing that frustrates me sometimes: decent package/library management like on Linux. I've resorted to isolating these issues in VMs running Linux. Anyone else has a better approach? Do you --PREFIX everything you compile? This can be particularly painful for academic software: this type of soft has the annoying tendency to become abandonware the second the Phd thesis is written or publication has been accepted.

Is using prefix really all that annoying? I run Ubuntu as well as OS X, and I like to keep my compiled software segregated from my package installed software. This means I "prefix everything". I mean really, using --prefix is minor in contrast to some of the other difficulties encountered when compiling software.

Homebrew has advanced the state of package management on OS X significantly. Anyone considering a Mac laptop should look in to it to see if the packages you need are there.

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

locate isn't missing. The database isn't built by default, but you can do that.

Mouse-Rig-Test:~ jon$ locate usage: locate [-0Scims] [-l limit] [-d database] pattern ...

default database: `/var/db/locate.database' or $LOCATE_PATH

Mouse-Rig-Test:~ jon$ which locate

/usr/bin/locate

Or, just use mdfind, the command line interface to spotlight.

Spotlight can be a little wonky as far as what it indexes. At least by default, it ignores things locate doesn't.

The solution to it running warmer with Ubuntu is to run a utility to manage the fan speeds and keep it cooler. It works just fine for me that way.

I've had a few Thinkpads running Ubuntu and now a MBP running Ubuntu.. and I prefer the MBP.

Ubuntu runs hot on the MBP and will chew through your battery power

This was the case with my Lenovo as well until I found powertop and followed its suggestions.

I take issue with several of the items you mentioned:

One, Terminal on Mac is extremely useful, even if the Page Up/Down keys don't work.

Second, those keys do what I expect in Terminal right now on my Mac, and I've done nothing special to get them working.

Third, Mac does come with curl preinstalled, which fits a very similar tool niche to wget.

In general, it is true that there are some Linux-centric tools and packages that currently don't build easily or have preexisting binary ports for Mac, however, that's true in reverse as well. And I can assure you that Mac provides a much more Linux-like experience in a terminal than MS Windows. Also, keep in mind, that with many of the software packages in the Open Source world, it's up to individual people to do the work to get a particular package working perfectly on a particular platform permutation. Nobody "owes" you anything, or guarantees any particular permutation will be perfect. Therefore, while there might be 1000's of libraries and applications that do work perfectly and have equal availability on Linux and Mac, it may not be wise to assume that everything will be, and then cite any specific imperfection as "bizarre" or spectacular failure. It's just software, it's very complex, and if nobody has come before you to smooth that particular cow path then it won't be smooth unless you yourself do the smoothing. :)

> those keys do what I expect in Terminal right now on my Mac, and I've done nothing special to get them working.

Try using vim or other applications that run in the command-line.

> And I can assure you that Mac provides a much more Linux-like experience in a terminal than MS Windows.

Yes. A much more Linux like experience than Windows. And a much less Linux like experience than Linux.

vim: k, but vi and other CLI apps tend to already have keys for doing paging that are "native" to the app and/or more "homerow friendly". The Page Up/Down keys on many keyboard tend to be in awkward locations like far off to the right side, for example, of where the center of typing gravity is located.

> 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).

I assume you mean 68000 series to PowerPC transition? I lived through that and thought it was handled even better than the recent PPC -> Intel transition. Programs were compiled as FAT binaries for years and years because of the huge installed base of 68k machines. I don't see how you could have had a "brick" after just 6 months.

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.

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

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.

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.

'joe'?

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

The first thing I install on every new FreeBSD machine ;-)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

how's the battery life on that thing?

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.

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.

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.

1. I have a white plastic netbook too that cost almost half. I don't see any cracks in it. You are arguing that a $1000+ machine can have cracks in it after a month because it's not a "premium" product. That just sounds like the bleating of an Apple apologist. Furthermore, you don't address the dead HDD, the fraying power cable, the dead earphones and the non-functional 3G on the phone.

2. http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliab... Quote and write properly please, learn to capitalise. Apple are mediocre with good product aesthetics (I'll give them that, although see below) and excellent PR and an ok-ish window and application manager (which has nothing on apt-get) they whacked on top of existing open source. They may be big now but it took an emergency investment from Microsoft to save them, and even then it took masses of open source software (and a few iterations of OS X) before they had anything passable to run on their doddering hardware. Also, as you sound like an Apple fanatic who notoriously get these things wrong, I'd point out that the mouse was taken from Englebart window manager concept was taken from Xerox (in addition to the OS from BSD and Webkit from KDE). There are also posts showing Johnathan Ive plundered product designs from the past. So the innovation is paper thin, the engineering is massively taken from elsewhere, some of the product design is taken too and the reliability is mediocre as proven by the stats.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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! :)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

ThinkPad X or T series. Booyaka.

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

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.

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.

+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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

You can set up shortcuts for those things with a combination of BetterTouchTool (free) and Divvy (not so free).

BetterTouchTool might even do everything you need, but I'm not completely sure about that.

Try SizeUp for resizing and positioning your windows.

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"

You are my hero.

Seriously.

I had two find this twice - once when I got the mac, and a year later on a new install.

It was hard to find both times.

You can dismiss dialogs without enabling that.

Enter = Ok, Escape = Cancel, Command-D is "Don't Save" in "Would you like to save?" dialogs, etc.

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.

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.

Command+Tab?

Cmd+Tab doesn't switch to the most recently visited window. With Cmd+Tab and Shift+Cmd+Tab, you have to remember if your last move was forward or backward. I keep forgetting that. Unfortunately it's something I do hundereds of times each day. The other issue I have with OS X usability is how to quickly maximize a window.

switch among windows:

command + ~

when you get that going with the command tab switching you can fly!

No flying here. Cmd+~ doesn't switch to the most recently used window either.

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.

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.

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

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

http://www.dell.com/ubuntu

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

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.

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

Very true - I'm using a Quad core E6410 (which I picked up at refurb when I was stateside). Superb machine. Better than recent thinkpads, I would say.

However, I do hit the bug with ubuntu suspend/resume.

If I install Ubuntu on it, does pretty much everything work? I don't care too much about suspend/resume, but I do need the wireless to work.

Suspend/resume works flawlessly on my E6500. Wireless too.

I'm using ubuntu with the fw43-cutter wifi and it's working great. Suspend/resume hasn't been a problem either.

I have not had problems with Dell's wireless for the past 1 year.

If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, I havent seen a Dell laptop where the wireless wasnt out-of-the-box.

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

The Dell Outlet can provide substantial savings if you are a bit patient or lucky.

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/notebooks/ct.aspx?refid=notebo...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Thankfully I have a Thinkpad 410s replacing it tomorrow.

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.

I on the other hand love the touchpad. It taught me not to use the mouse anymore (and I was a hardcore mouse person before).

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.

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. :)

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.

In the latest version of Ubuntu (Meerkat), the annoying delay before being able to enter a password in the lock screen on resume is gone.

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.

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

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...

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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

Lenovo Thinkpad FTW

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 :)

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).

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

it's ok for running vim. :)

01010100 00111101

The end.

Macbook pro, because Linux on a laptop sucks balls.

2003 called, it wants its stereotypes back.

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.

Nobody buys a Macbook Pro because of the hardware, it's all about the OS.

If I was going to buy a new Windows only laptop, I'd buy a Macbook Pro.

Would you though? Surely anyone who buys a Mac would just use OS X (and then dual boot Windows for whatever reason they needed it for.)

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.

I'm quite serious. I am however also aware that I'm upsetting the entire Apple fanboy segment in here. (with slight intent admittedly)

MacBook Pros are premium indeed. But unless you're looking specifically for the "premium" look, then there's no reason to default to Macs.

Please bear in mind that I base all my comments on first hand, personal experience. As stated I've been running on a tiny, flimsy, plastic thing for years. My trusty machine have been thrown around and even landed on a stone floor from ~2m, with me onto. I have the marks to show for it, but the machine merely chipped at the edge.

Your argument about the LCDs being inferior I simply don't follow. What makes you think you're getting a different LCD in your MBP than everybody else does? It's the same technology as in all other machines out there.

I know specs are easy to dismiss, but honestly, it's not the extra shine that makes your computer run faster.

You hit the nail on the head (pun intended) with your analogy - why should the carpenter choose a specific brand or hammer just for the aluminum handle? Inexpensive is not the same as "cheapass". You get plenty of quality machines at half the prices of a MBP.

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