Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

I recently purchased one of these with the upgraded CPU and RAM(4.0 ghz CPU 16gb RAM): https://system76.com/cart/configure/lemu8

And I enjoy using it much more than either of the Macbooks I've gotten from work (A MBP 2015 and currently a MBP w/ the emoji bar). The keyboard is worlds better than current iteration MBP keyboards which I can't stand. I like just about everything better on this laptop than on the MBP save for the speakers which are pretty crap but I knew that going in as the form factor is made to be as portable as possible. The Pop OS is pretty nice but definitely has a couple of annoying bugs (nothing deal breaking though) but you can also have the laptop shipped with Ubuntu or just install whatever distro you are most comfortable with.

Performance wise it's just as good if not better than the MBP, almost everything feels a bit snappier but it could just be my imagination. I haven't benchmarked them or compared timings or anything.

IMO almost any laptop you install Linux on is better than a MBP so I may be a bit biased. The hardware is nice but overpriced and the software is just... terrible IMO. No native package manager, OS updates as of late are of questionable quality at best and their plans to start making their own chips don't fill me with confidence.

I had also looked in to this model: https://system76.com/cart/configure/galp3

But it was a bit more than I wanted to spend at the time, however it does fit in to your budget so might be worth looking in to.

I have a Thinkpad P71 and I run NixOS on it. Works great with a 5k monitor, and DPI is perfect.

> I ditched the T5XX series when they borked the keyboard layout by adding a numpad

Let's hope this changes soon.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T/...

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-wants-to-release-a-new-...

My colleagues use WSL for git and a few other linux CLI tools necessary to their work that git bash just wont quite cut it for. I often help them out with CLI stuff and I can say as both a full Linux user and an old x mac user (not exactly a fan these days), it's not comparable to mac... maybe one day, sure it's a real linux userland, but whatever majik layer they built on top of their kernel makes it feel like WINE inverted, some stuff is fine, other just painfully slow or erratic, also the terminal application is just horrid.

Sure mac is a weird mix of old bits of BSD tools and GNU but at least it's running natively, it's terminal application also has some crufty bits but it's still far more usable.

Oh also creating and modifying files in windows causes all kinds of issues with linux, because a) permissions and b) windows arbitrarily locks files... this really fucks with git. Someone goes and git pull some stuff and find out later that windows silently didn't let it's canned linux update the working tree properly... and then at commit time things get messy (where I come in), they aren't that experienced with git so it makes for a pretty shitty learning experience, even as an experienced git user it would piss me off if i had to put up with that all the time.

Anyway, if it was my choice and i _had_ to use windows for some reason, I would still stick linux in a VM or dual boot, you can trust it isn't half working that way.