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

The Stealth has pretty small bezel sizes. It can also be configured with an 8th gen quad core i7. Its got Thunderbolt 3, and because its running Windows you get full external graphics card support whether your needs are professional or gaming. RGB keyboard backlighting :). With a 512gb SSD, that config comes out to $1700, which feels like a very fair price especially when compared to some of the Surface laptops (its impossible to configure any 16gb Surface laptop for less than $2000).

The rest of the Blade lineup is in dire need of a refresh, as you say. The bezels are ridiculous when compared to some of the recent high performance offerings from Dell, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.

As for linux, this is an intensely personal decision, but with W10 + the Windows Subsystem for Linux, its actually pretty darn usable. Its not like Cygwin or a virtual machine; its literally a bash app that almost emulates a linux distro of your choice, and works identically to if you're in that linux distro. These videos explain it pretty well [1] [2].

Of course, you're still working in Windows, so if the UI is the reason why you don't want to use Windows then you'll have to virtualize or dual-boot or whatever. But, in a lot of ways, this is more of an advantage than a con: it gives you access to all of the software that isn't available on Linux, like Office, Adobe, games, etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfRo63afjtM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP_T_m0UV9E

Do your co-workers not have issues with HiDPI support on Linux? I've heard it's not the best experience and can require quite some fiddling to get working correctly.

lots of comments are suggesting alternatives but my opinion is that, no, despite its flaws there is still nothing better on the market than MBP

Dell Precision 9560 works really well with Ubuntu in my experience.

Not perfect though. Keyboard is usable but thin, 16:9 sucks, glossy screen sucks, had to get a matte film cover to tone it down.

4k rocks though, thunderbolt docking station pretty good also.

A bit of background: I'm a system administrator of a large computing cluster, and I also develop high performance scientific computing as my side-academic life. The software I develop targets clusters similar to I administer, so I use a lot of Linux, and the software I develop makes the development workstations scream during testing.

I personally own a MacBook Pro, and my office gave me (actually I wanted them to buy) an HP EliteBook 850 G2. HP EliteBook is a terrific Linux machine. Everything works out of the box. The backside is accessible with a single latch. It has semi-metal body, reasonably slim and light. Better, it lasts 7 hours on battery (which can be easily replaced), has upgradeable RAM, a separate M2 slot for an additional SSD if you need multi terabyte hard drives, and an eDPI screen (I don't remember the resolution, but it's high). Oh, it has 180 degree hinges, which are non-exotic type.

If you want to go berserk, you can add WWAN with GPS support.

It has some convenience features too. Glass touchpad, a very good backlit keyboard and better than acceptable speakers. If you want good audio, headphone jack is very good sounding. The machine I use is dual core, very low voltage variant, but the performance is more than enough for 90% of the tasks I perform at office. Since it's very low voltage, it's very very quiet and cool.

All-in-all it's a developer's dream if you want to step away from MacBook.

Addendum: I disabled the external AMD GPU on it, I use Intel's on-cpu GPU, and I've driven 1920x1200 screens over DP without any problems, inc. hot-plug support.

Last, but not the least: HP has a fantastic BIOS which also has nice amenities like advanced charge cutoff and restart percentages like Lenovo Thinkpads.