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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Better than a Dell XPS 15 is no standard at all. The Dell XPS 15 is an utterly terrible laptop that breaks if you close the lid and put it in your bag when you get up from your seat. It's a portable desktop falsely advertised as a laptop due to its many flaws. If the best that can be said for apple is better than Dell XPS 15, that is a really, really damning review. I hope it's vastly better than that for you.

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> Better than a Dell XPS 15 is no standard at all.

so what is the laptop that would meet this standard for which you're making a judgement?

So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).

Not OP, but I have to chime in here- Dell's XPS line somehow got a reputation that it absolutely did not deserve as a good laptop to run linux on (or a good laptop at all).

I've been perfectly happy with a surface book 2, and various Lenovo and HP laptops. They each have better and worse product lines. Currently rocking an HP elitebook for personal use and a MB Pro for work.

The hardware quality is more or less the same on both. With the pro, you get a moderately better touchpad, a bit thinner and metal chassis. On the other hand, crap keyboard and the abomination that is the touch bar, and no legacy ports.

Personally, I don't think I would buy Apple for myself ever again, but that's just me.

The fact that we even have to debate about which laptop is good for Linux or not makes me not want to bother. I switched to Mac 12 years ago, and I never had to bother thinking about choosing hardware since. It just works.

It got the reputation because it is well deserved. The clickpad is far superior than macs and the software support is great

No one will ever convince me that a laptop with a web cam whose position is limited to looking straight up your nose is quality.

I primarily navigate by keyboard, so the difference between an acceptable and amazing trackpad is pretty minimal for my preferences. On the other hand, port wonkiness, temperamental wifi, okay keys, mediocre battery, driver issues and an utterly useless webcam convinced me to ditch the XPS the first chance I got. It's amazing I used it nearly 18 months.

> Dell's XPS line somehow got a reputation that it absolutely did not deserve as a good laptop to run linux on

This is where it started... https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-24-dell-now-offering-studio...

>So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).

Milage may vary with other manufacturers, it doesn't look like you would change to another manufacturer. Which is ok.

Check business notebooks, from HP or Lenovo. (I forgot one particular Dell series.)

Ok... so what's the laptop that can compete with the new 14 and 16 Macbook Pros then and doesn't have some stupid flaw? The issue with waking up in bags seems to be caused by Modern Standby which is on most new Windows laptops?

I was going to say just disable modern standby because that was totally a thing until spring 2020 when the registry key to disable it was removed.

Microsoft is basically a toy OS run by incompetents without reasonable QA unfit to be anything but a launcher for stream.

HP Z-book, some Lenovo Thinkpads and some consumer Lenovo and HP notebooks.

I would go with a Lenovo or HP machine before a Dell. Even if they all have the sleep issue (I don't know if that's the case), both Lenovo and HP have better build quality.

I've had multiple Asus laptops (UX305, UX330 and most recently S435UA) and all of them ran Fedora flawlessly out of the box. Granted, none of them had Nvidia GPUs which is the usual pain point of desktop Linux.

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