Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

Macbook Pros are premium notebooks in the exact same way high end Thinkpads are. The price between a Macbook Pro and any other high end notebook is competitive.

With an inexpensive brand, you're getting inferior screens and flimsy plastic bodies. The specs might line up on paper, but that's as naive an approach to comparing hardware as you can get. Buying based on a flimsy spec checklist versus matching up the device to your real-world requirements is going to result in a great deal of buyer remorse.

If you're a road warrior, the last thing you want is a laptop with a flimsy body and weak solder points on the ports. If you are using your laptop as your only screen, you don't want to be spending >= 8h a day looking at a cheapass LCD.

Just like you don't see professional carpenters using dollar store tools, as a professional developer, you need to invest in quality hardware - regardless of the brand.

I run Emacs a lot, develop for Django, run Eclipse very rarely and I am quite happy with a very modest Acer netbook. Most of the time, it sits on my desk connected to a big monitor, keyboard and mouse. Web browsing and Flash-heavy sites are a problem, as is the Intel GMA due to the 2048x2048 screen size limitation for hardware acceleration.

I can't overestimate how welcome is the portability it affords carrying my whole "desktop" environment in a small bag. If I drop it, everything important is backed up thanks to the twin miracles of rsync and version control.

I have long given up on high-end notebooks. They are typically big and heavy and faster than I usually need. Also, losing one is a bit more painful than just having to pay US$400 for a faster equivalent and doing an environment restore.

But I will certainly recommend the Dell Studio 15 + Ubuntu.

Drivers work without problems (just a small step to take with the wifi) and is quite stable. My partners that own MPB had problems with theirs during this time, plus if the need to have a presentation they need to carry additional HW.

This is optional and IIRC, not on by default.

I have to add:

> Thanks, but my music is already arranged the way I like.

This just baffles me. Why would you ever manually arrange your music? I used to do this when I use Linux because I basically had to if I wanted to browse it in any sane way, but I much prefer having some app do it for me. It just strikes me as one of the many things that my computer can do well, so it should do it.

> iTunes doesn't play flac or ogg. And when I rip a CD, it wants to save it in some proprietary flac-like format (which, as far as I know, does not work on non-macs).

I have no clue about non-macs (iTunes generally sucks in Windows IMO) so I can't really help, but in OSX if you have the codec installed, it will work.

> I enjoy controlling my music from a phone/tablet/other computer.

Google around, there are a lot of remotes for iTunes (free one from Apple for iOS, one for android here: http://dacp.jsharkey.org/).

iTunes is one of the main things that I'd miss if I switched to Linux full-time.