Ask HN: Best robust laptop for everyday software development

Hi HN, I've been a long term user of both Thinkpads and Macbooks. Back in the old days I loved to work on Thinkpads and loved their robustness. I'm owning a X1 Carbon and have to say that the quality is rather disappointing to me, display broke already presumably from lots of traveling. Macbook is okay, but for running and developing on Linux not very optimal. The keyboard on a Thinkpad is also nicer to use (imho). I moan that we don't have the old days where Thinkpads used to be what they stand for, that is, being robust laptops for everyday development. Any experience / recommendation with rugged laptops (e.g. the rugged Latitude)? If you were to buy a new (robust) laptop to work with and travel often, what would it be?

Thinkpad, Latitude or ZBook. All of them are approximately on the same level when it comes to ruggedness -- maybe HP has slightly worse QA but that's only my anecdotal experience.

I only used Apple products for about a decade, but last year I bought a Dell XPS which I run Ubuntu on. If you're looking to run linux, the XPS is a great choice. The hardware quality is extremely high---long battery life, ridiculous screen resolution (and it's a touchscreen), fast processor, and plenty of storage.

My only complaints stem from the fact that, when using linux, there are inevitably things that don't work as smoothly as they do on OSX, e.g., syncing with google drive.

The X220/30 is still a very viable Dev machine if you don't mind the screen.

As a word of caution, I went down the MBP route myself and was recently caught with the dust under the keyboard membrane problem. You probably aren't accurately evaluating how annoying it is to randomly lose your laptop for a few weeks while they repair the keyboard. I certainly was not.