I'm using the Dell Developer XPS 13, fresh installed with Xubuntu 14.04 (XFCE is by far the best), with no problems. It's very competitive with the MacBook Air line, similar lightness but with good performance. The keyboard types really well, and doesn't have a lot of weird extra buttons like many PC laptops do. It's also devoid of the legacy oddities many PC laptops have (red nipples in the keyboard, VGA ports, etc).
I did have to make a slight tweak to the trackpad config, but I believe they have fixed that with a recent change. If not, google for synaptics AreaBottomEdge and that will give you what you need to tune it.
I previously had a MacBook, and decided to stop using Apple products after the Bitcoin app ban fiasco (and because I don't agree with many of their policies). Now that I'm comfortable with my Linux laptop, I like it a lot more than my old MacBook. It's been a great experience, and it also means my development environment is closer to my production one, so I'm happy with it.
Edit: Despite my reservations towards the legacy weirdness of the Thinkpad line, I've learned through observation that they are kindof the industry standard for Linux laptops right now, and people seem to like them. When I meet someone running a Linux laptop, it's usually a thinkpad.
The "legacy ThinkPad weirdness" is one of the reasons why ThinkPads are popular for Linux (and free OS's in general). Older ThinkPads were IBM PC first and laptop second, thus were designed such that the whole thing works reasonably well when you run DOS on it (ie. OS that predates ACPI and thus has no idea that such thing even exists) and it not only worked, but was actually supported by IBM. This allowed Linux to work reasonably without any special considerations towards laptop-specific hardware. Somehow, this was deemed insufficient and commmunity had reverse engineered almost complete BIOS and embedded controller APIs for ThinkPad line (it certainly helps that these APIs are remarkably backward compatible, even though IBM->Lenovo transition had broken some important features like hardware volume control)
+1 on the XPS 13 (although I got mine refurbed rather than the dev edition) - aside from a little typical wifi flakiness, it's bloody fantastic and very un-Dell!
I must say it's strange to me to pick dell over apple because of an App Store policy. If dell had an App Store, how confident are you their policies would be better than apple's?
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I'm using the Dell Developer XPS 13, fresh installed with Xubuntu 14.04 (XFCE is by far the best), with no problems. It's very competitive with the MacBook Air line, similar lightness but with good performance. The keyboard types really well, and doesn't have a lot of weird extra buttons like many PC laptops do. It's also devoid of the legacy oddities many PC laptops have (red nipples in the keyboard, VGA ports, etc).
I did have to make a slight tweak to the trackpad config, but I believe they have fixed that with a recent change. If not, google for synaptics AreaBottomEdge and that will give you what you need to tune it.
I previously had a MacBook, and decided to stop using Apple products after the Bitcoin app ban fiasco (and because I don't agree with many of their policies). Now that I'm comfortable with my Linux laptop, I like it a lot more than my old MacBook. It's been a great experience, and it also means my development environment is closer to my production one, so I'm happy with it.
Edit: Despite my reservations towards the legacy weirdness of the Thinkpad line, I've learned through observation that they are kindof the industry standard for Linux laptops right now, and people seem to like them. When I meet someone running a Linux laptop, it's usually a thinkpad.
The "legacy ThinkPad weirdness" is one of the reasons why ThinkPads are popular for Linux (and free OS's in general). Older ThinkPads were IBM PC first and laptop second, thus were designed such that the whole thing works reasonably well when you run DOS on it (ie. OS that predates ACPI and thus has no idea that such thing even exists) and it not only worked, but was actually supported by IBM. This allowed Linux to work reasonably without any special considerations towards laptop-specific hardware. Somehow, this was deemed insufficient and commmunity had reverse engineered almost complete BIOS and embedded controller APIs for ThinkPad line (it certainly helps that these APIs are remarkably backward compatible, even though IBM->Lenovo transition had broken some important features like hardware volume control)
The TrackPoint is not a "legacy oddity," it's a far superior input method compared to a trackpad, if you take the time to learn how to use it.
IMHO the proper way to use a pointing device is "sparingly", which suits the trackpoint _perfectly_.
Exactly. I hate trackpads, and would love to be able to buy a new thinkpad without one.
+1 on the XPS 13 (although I got mine refurbed rather than the dev edition) - aside from a little typical wifi flakiness, it's bloody fantastic and very un-Dell!
I think Kubuntu is slightly better
I must say it's strange to me to pick dell over apple because of an App Store policy. If dell had an App Store, how confident are you their policies would be better than apple's?
Dell is a hardware company, Apple is primarily a closed-garden software company with hardware as a lock-in to the former.