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I also have a t480, mines running Ubuntu but unfortunately I’m giving it up for a new MacBook Air. The touchpads on the thinkpads are beyond horrible after using macs for many years, it’s finally too annoying for me to keep going :(

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If you want to stick with Linux, I can vouch for Dell's XPS range. I've been running Ubuntu and Arch on various generations of XPS 13 for about 8 years now with minimal issues. Honestly, my work-issued Macbooks have been more problematic than my XPS laptops. It definitely helps that Dell actively support Ubuntu and provide kernel patches.

I just switched from an older XPS13 to a 2019 ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

With Fedora, everything (except the fingerprint reader) just worked, even firmware updates. No configuration, no messing around, the entire process was flawless.

I don't care for the fingerprint reader, and the USB-C dock uses DisplayLink, which is beyond awful.

If you want something cheap: For Linux 18.04 / Windows 10 dual boot, I just bought an HP 15-cs2073cl: $450 refurb from Microcenter. Everything works and I think the price is pretty good for a Core-i7 / 16 GB / 1920 / 1TB laptop.

Here's a link, but I see the price already gone up a little:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/612786/hp-pavilion-15-cs...

It has a slot for an M.2 card that does not interfere with the rotating SATA drive, so I'm about to try that. I'd like to have both installed. SSD is nice for Linux but is absolutely required for Windows.

One nice thing about Dell XPS: they have the Thunderbolt port. I theorize that this is potentially very useful for a corner case that I have: you can add a PCIe box and add a parallel printer port card that accepts ancient security dongles required by certain engineering software that I invested in the past.

> NVIDIA GeForce MX250

NVidia, no way to working fine on Linux: you will wait for new drivers after each kernel update and tons of another issues.

You are not wrong, this is what I've found:

As installed: 18.04 works, but long delay when you login because nouveau driver is having problems (a bunch of timeouts from it in dmesg). But it does seem to work (I didn't understand the reason for the delay at first).

Install Nvidia closed-source "435" driver: the above problem is fixed, but now it does not recover from suspend.

Force it to use the Intel GPU with "nvidia-settings". Now all is good. Intel driver is supposed to be lower power anyway.

It's interesting that the there are two GPUs that can share the same video port.

There is also something going with the WIFI driver:

     iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: FW already configured (0) - re-configuring
     iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: BIOS contains WGDS but no WRDS

But it does work.

I've found that installing a 1 TB M.2 EVO 860 SSD works, and you can also have the mechanical hard drive at the same time. However, the BIOS is stupid: it always wants to boot from the 2.5" drive, so you need to install grub on it. I used a Samsung migration tool to move Windows 10 to the SSD, but Windows itself is stupid- it's random whether it boots the new SSD partition or the old 2.5" partition.

However if you don't like the Dell and it's not defective, they can charge a 15% restocking fee. That could be hundreds old dollars for a top of the line xps 15. For me, this is a deal breaker. There is nowhere to test the machine in a physical store. Maybe they will fix their return policy in the future, but for now, it's not customer friendly at all.

Later models have some issues, my personal 2019 XPS13 has lots of graphical glitching issues on 19.10, My colleagues with 2019 XPS 15s on 18.04 have various display and performance issues while my 2017 XPS 15 is just fine on 18.04.

I'm hoping 20.04 will be a smoother experience once it's released (we only run LTSs on development machines at work).

One of my new team members couldn't get her brand new XPS15 to output to a 4K TV (1080p internal disolay) on 18.04 yesterday. The screen would just constantly flash on and off. We had to settle for her using 1080 for presentations etc on the office TVs as no combination of proprietary drivers or Nvidia on/off resolved it.

Can't wait for 9300 developer edition, going to pick it up hopefully very soon.

The new dev edition comes with ubuntu out of the box I believe

Huh... I have the exact opposite feeling. I've used a MBPr for work the last two years, and I absolutely hate it. I've pushed to get a good solid Lenovo, but that's been repeatedly rejected as they like the convenience of the whole office using OSX and Apple hardware.

I've felt the touchpad wasn't sensitive enough and the click action was way too feeble. Combined with the mushy feeling of the keyboard and the atrocious user experience of the OS, I can barely stand using it each day.

I agree mostly on the hardware complaints ( I have the same and I use a mechanic keyboard and standalone trackpad), but not sure about atrocious user experience of the OS. One of the biggest plus of mac is that it's terminal is posix.

In my opinion, that's the only positive to using OSX. Wish they didn't use an old as hell version of Bash. For my Linux work, I code to Bash 4, and I've been bit a few times when my scripts won't run on my laptop due that.

The need for 3rd party software (spectacles) to allow me to use hot-keys to shift windows around (native feature in Windows, Linux, and iirc even the windows manager in Sun V when I used it for a short time). Same story to alter the behavior of alt-tab.

I also can't prevent windows from stealing focus if some random app decides it wants to pop up something (again native option in every other OS I've used). That's apparently been an active complaint on the internet for somewhere close to a decade from what I've seen during my fruitless searches for a solution.

I've had numerous issues related to the App store randomly signing out, which may not be an issue to normal users, but in my case the office uses a shared app store account to handle App Store purchases, so that was exceedingly irritating but probably a "it's just you" type of complaint.

And none of that even touches the debacle that is Catalina. I ended up completely re-installing the OS, as a vast majority of software I needed wasn't compatible due to the deprecation of 32-bit support.

All in all, I personally hate the OS and can't stand it. I'm currently looking for a new role, and can't deny I'm giddy at the chance to get away from it. And honestly, I'd probably turn down a position if it came with the requirement to use OSX again.

However, I do recognize this is my experience and others really do enjoy OSX. But to each his own.

I wondered why Apple use an old bash version, Google said: "The reason that Apple includes such an old version of Bash in its operating system has to do with licensing. Since version 4.0 (successor of 3.2), Bash uses the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), which Apple does not (want to) support."

You can easily upgrade the bash to 4+ on mac. Just have to do it yourself.

I have a new macbook air, no complaints except that the keyboard is still butterfly. They DO jam.

If I were in your shoe, I'd wait for a longer traveling version of the keyboard that's not butterfly.

I'm doing exactly this - excited about the speed and screens on the new ones, but waiting for the longer travel keyboard to come back.

I can get along with my 2015 for now, but I really miss the Retina display and it is pretty slow for doing heavier stuff.

I have an older macbook air, The new ones even with the faulty keyboard is a lot better considering the increased trackpad size, the screen alone is probably worth it.

I thought I was fine with the old screen turns out I was just used to it, the new one is such an upgrade, the tradeoff being that the processor power is about the same. Which don't matter to me that much as it's mostly text editing for me.

in the non-mac world, ThinkPads have some of the best touchpads, too.

The closest to a mac touchpad I have seen so far has been the Dell XPS touchpad, which imo is hands-down the best touchpad experience on a non-mac machine.

The only issue I have with the trackpads on Linux is palm rejection not working. This is an annoyingly common problem unfortunately, so you rest your wrist for just a second while typing and the cursor jumps to some random point on the screen and clicks.

Recent libinput's palm rejection works fine for me. Though I've had to test that deliberately… on the Pixelbook, my wrists are always on the rubber wrist rest thingies and never on the touchpad.

Haven't had a thinkpad for a few years. Are they still dimpled? edit: doesn't look like it

I have an HP EliteBook 850 G2 and a MacBook Pro. I don't find the trackpoint and trackpad on my HP to be off-putting TBH.

Yes, it lacks many gestures but, KDE has ample replacements for these gestures I think.

If we don't count the keyboard issues, no laptop on the market is as nice to use as an MBP. If I had one with a physical escape key, I could probably make the statement without even that reservation.

But if you prefer Ubuntu to macOS for whatever reason, I've found the Dell XPS line to be good enough to be tolerable.

> If I had one with a physical escape key

This is why I bought a Macbook Air, they still have a physical escape key and my vim muscle movements will not allow me to remap that key anywhere else.

BTW The 16inch Macbook Pros also have a physical escape key now, to the left of the touchbar.

I vastly prefer my SB2 to every MBP I have used. Great typing experience, less problems with throttling, more versatile.

It's possible to map the Caps Lock key to Escape as long as you don't need Caps Lock functionality.

That got remapped to control a long time ago for me. Will never be able to have it be anything else now.

The 16 Pro has a much less butterflyish keyboard.

But, then, the newer T490's can have up to 64 gigs of RAM, SATA and an M2 ssd

Try disabling the trackpad and then just use the trackpoint.

I have this exact model and have attempted to use trackpoint under Ubuntu and it is just slow and I'm constantly overshooting my target. I'm so much better with the trackpad that I really wonder how people that use trackpoint swear by it. I must be missing something.

Increase the sensitivity to max and try to guide it using just light touches. It's supposed to be relaxing on the fingers, if there's any finger strain, your sensitivity is too low.

Okay, increasing the sensitivity definitely helped with the slowness, but I'm still overshooting a lot. Maybe one day I'll get there. :)

Trackpoints don't have multi-touch gestures and they feel like they accelerate the onset of RSI.

I do this, but I can see how many people would have a hard time giving up the touchpad. The gestures are nice and I do have more control on a good touchpad. However, for my use case not having to move off home row beats touchpad gestures.

Then you still don't have a good trackpad. Besides, the trackpoint is drifting across all models. I like to use it, but it's beyond my imagination why people think this is the best a manufacturer could do.

I've been using the trackpoint for so long that the trackpad seems hard to use to me.

I always disable the trackpad but I fear someday thinkpads might drop the trackpoint altogether as I don't see many people using them.

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