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Comment by ythn | Hacker News Reader

I've had so many problems with my XPS 13 that I bought in 2016 that I will never buy another one. Killer WiFi card was utter crap, laptop has issues going to sleep and waking up when closing the lid (sometimes it would hang on the the dell screen when trying to wake up and never recover), etc. Purely anecdotal, but a hard pass for me. Lenovo is my new laptop brand of choice.

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I went the other direction. Bought a Thinkpad due to how amazing they were in the past. Found that the build quality had gone way down. Was pretty disappointed as this expensive piece of hardware developed cracks on the casing within the first year.

Switched to an XPS 15 and have been very happy. Love the build quality, specs are good enough. Battery life is much better even on Linux.

YMMV!

Which model? We are looking into buying quite a few, and Thinkpads are the first choice here. We never had problems in the past, but I've been hearing about problems in their mid-range models. I'd like to avoid those, at the very least.

Not OP, but I got the X1 Carbon, which was (at the time) their top-of-the-line Ultrabook and believed to be their most Linux-compatible laptop.

I had a number of issues with the Thinkpad that were all relatively minor in and of themselves, but overall, I ended up switching back to the XPS 13, and I plan on sticking with this line.

I'm on my third X1C. First-gen, 3rd then 5th generation. Never had an issue with Linux compatibility. The middle one had a malfunction with the voltage regulator, promptly fixed by Lenovo. Other than that, my opinion on the X1 Carbon is stellar. I'm wary of some of the newer models, but not of this one.

I have a kaby lake xps 13 and have never seen it fail to resume (and I suspend/resume very frequently). There is a really annoying bug between the dell bios and the intel pstate driver where it often gets stuck at a super low cpu frequency after resume though :(

The Killer wifi has been reliable for me, IMO atheros or intel is always a good choice for wifi on linux

Seconded. Build quality on the 9360 isn't great, trackpad and keyboard leave much to be desired for a high-end laptop. CPU seems to be throttled to deal with overheating, so performance just feels lacking.

Coil whine, stability and WiFi (terrible at first) have improved after some BIOS updates this year. Also my trackpad has stopped rattling, probably dirt got into the gap and plugged it.

Dell customer service experience was also poor when buying. Next laptop I'll be going back to Lenovo.

Lenovo's higher-end machines are still solid, but their midrange and low-end machines are really disappointing. Sucks that you've had this experience, but among the folks I work with, Dell's high-end machines have a rep for being really reliable in both Windows and Linux. My next machine's probably an Alienware 13, but the lighter XPS 13 is real tempting too.

Did you look into the Razer Blade series? https://www.razerzone.com/gaming-laptops

No. I find Razer as a company to appeal to the "x-treme gamer" set in ways I wouldn't want to support, but I also think their branding is childish and would not walk into a meeting with a client with that huge gross logo on it. It would look bad.

I'd rather get a laptop with no branding at all, but the Alienware logo is at least really small. (And the keyboard on the Alienware 13 is good, my brother has one.)

You could just put a sticker on it, company logo or something. There's only one place where the logo is visible anyway.

I'm an independent consultant: the "company" is me. And I think stickers look silly.

Razers are nice-looking machines but last time I checked the biggest processor you could get for the most portable one was dual core, and the next model up (the 14 inch model) had pretty bad battery life.

I'm still looking for the perfect replacement for a MacBook Pro. Hopefully when the 2018 XPS 15 comes out...

The new thin/light one ("stealth") is quad core.

For me, that's basically the Alienware 13. With the discrete GPU off it seems to get 4-5 hours (at least, according to my brother, who owns one) and that's good enough for me, while also having 32GB of RAM and a 7700HQ.

Which lenovo product would you recommend for a linux laptop?

Generally, Thinkpads are recommended. I think, Red Hat employees all have Thinkpads or something along those lines, which is why they get lots of patches to make things go smoothly. No official support from Lenovo, though.

Ubuntu on Thinkpad T series works well, e.g.

https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201702-25371/

They are rugged and have a good keyboard. You can find a brand new at 70% of a Dell XPS price (at Lenovo's outlet / eBay / BHPhotovideo).

Woah I didn't know Canonical certifies Ubuntu on certain hardware. That's incredible, I love linux but I'm not a sysadmin and I've been burned before by hardware manufactures publishing windows-only driver binaries.

I use ThinkPad E450 (i7/16GB/SSD/FullHD). Started with Ubuntu 17.04 (unity), updated to 17.10 (gnome), didn't have any problems.

On most laptops you can swap the killer WiFi card for an Intel one using a screwdriver and 15 minutes. Drivers also "just work" on all three relevant desktop OS for the Intel chipset.

Your other advice on this page was to cover the logo on the lid with a sticker... [Here's my advice: pick a different laptop - there's quite a few good ones to choose from.]

If that's your only problem with the laptop, I don't understand why a (probably technically capable, on HN) person wouldn't just switch the WiFi card out.

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