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Comment by vhf | Hacker News Reader

Lack of good hardware/laptops.

I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible.

I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

What's your issue with the x250? It goes up to a i7-5600U, has a great keyboard with a tolerable layout, resolution up to 1080p which is pretty decent for a 12.5 inch screen. It even has a SO-DIMM slot rather than soldered on RAM so you can do 16GB of memory (caveat: 16GB SO-DIMMs are single-source and not cheap).

The x250 is still a hard upgrade to justify if you're coming from an x220/x230, due to the ULV processor. But there should be no question when coming from an x200.

I'm using HP ZBook 15 G2 Mobile Workstations with ubuntu 14 LTS since last 3 months. The only thing i miss is SSD that i didn't choose in my customization. Has 16GB RAM, i7 . I switch between Win 8.1 and linux (something lxde instead of unity). The nice thing about this linux can run VMs and it is pretty fast and even containers work well. Also Win 8.1 ultimate has hyperv role so you can use that as a hypervisor as well.

Initially i had 64 bit 15.x but some unity programs used to crash when it released , so i installed something good.

I'm didn't find any problem with anything until now.

http://www8.hp.com/in/en/campaigns/workstations/zbook-15.htm...

http://www8.hp.com/in/en/products/laptops/product-detail.htm...

Unfortunately, one look at that will tell you that it's no match for the rMBP in design or portability.

Try a 2015 Dell XPS 13. Fits all your specs, also has a developer edition with Ubuntu already installed.

No, it doesn't. The XPS 13 can only have a maximum of 8 GB RAM.

It's true, but I thought the limitation was that it only supports a single dimm and there aren't 16GB single dimms yet?

I believe the RAM is soldered in, so it's not like you could replace it later.

Developer edition is not out yet... I thought. I got one a couple months ago and run Arch on it. Support for the microphone hasn't made it into a kernel release yet, so I thought they were waiting for that to release the developer edition.

Also, it only supports 8 gigs max right now. I'm sure a 16g single dimm will come out eventually, so you could upgrade it yourself.

I believe the RAM is soldered on, upgrades may not be very feasible.

Oh no... you're right. I guess I'll just convince myself that 8GB is TOTALLY enough :-(

Same. I spend at least 2 days a year keeping my MBP installed with Ubuntu. Any major OSX upgrade and I need to reformat my Ubuntu partition and I'm constantly running out of space on both OSes. If Linux had proper video editing I wouldn't need to do this.

Thinkpad retro might a thing to look forward to:

http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/

Try the Asus Zenbook UX305, everything works out of the box with Ubuntu and it's as thin as a Macbook Air but more powerful and with a ridiculously high res screen.

Have you looked at the Clevo 230SS? It goes under the name Optimus VI with PC Specialist.

I'd warn you that I'm running a Clevo 230ST more or less maxed out on RAM and CPU, and while its a fantastic machine performance wise, and has a pretty good isplay and keyboard, the cooling is atrocious. Despite usually sounding like a jet engine it pretty regularly throttles the CPU due to overheating.

At some point I'll get to dismantling it and seeing if some more thermal paste helps matters, but in the meantime it can get really quite irritating. I'm currently sitting in a warm coffee shop window, and parts of it are getting to the point where they're uncomfortably warm to touch.

try ASUS Zenbook - best linux hardware I was working on so far.

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