Buy laptop

For Sony : I always regret buying from them pretty soon. Even if the device looks good on paper, you soon discover that obvious functionalities are arbitrarily disabled.

For instance, I quite liked the specs of VAIO TZ31 and bought one. But Sony decided that depite the fact it includes a processor that implements VT I should not use it. http://blog.steelooper.com/2009/07/enabling-virtualization-o... (Resulting in the fact that to this day I can't use VirtualBox with it.)

And this is to say nothing of the cryptic hardware devices that lack a free driver (webcam, flash memory...) that made my life very hard when I installed Debian on it.

FYI, Dell XPS13 Developer edition (natively under Ubuntu) looks good to me... Caveat : it lacks an ethernet port.

Depends what you want it for?