| tl;dr; Think about your daily workflows and what apps you use most often. How many of them are Mac-only and can you find an acceptable replacement in Linux (90% yes)? It's really easy to get started with Ubuntu and be productive from day 1. I've used Linux as my primary system since late 90's. I switched to a Mac for a few years twice and back to Linux. My motivation for the (latest) switch is the complete lack of quality hardware and the cost of buying a Mac (not to mention Apple's complete abandoning of the desktop). For details, look at all the discussions on HN about the latest MacBook Pro. I would echo what several people have stated here, about getting a Developer edition from Dell preloaded with Ubuntu. Those Precision laptops are not the same as the XPS's, though they look alike. The hardware is just different enough to make it easier to run on Linux. The way it worked for me is: I took stock of the apps I spent 90% of my day using on a Mac, which are: gVim, Terminal, Chrome, Firefox, Slack, Spotify, Keybase, Dropbox and a few system monitoring things. All of that runs great on Ubuntu out of the box and with an hour's worth of Googling, you'll have your laptop configured exactly as you want. The only real issue for me was dealing with the touchpad; all that took was installing a different driver and I was done. I do install the latest kernel when it comes out, but that's cause I like pain and is completely unnecessary. It's been a year since I made the switch and the only thing I miss from my Mac is Sketch. There is Gimp and Inkscape, but it's not the same. My workflows are the same, if not better. Running the same OS as the EC2 instances I'm running keeps a lot of dumb mistakes from deployments. Being able to spin up a bunch of Vagrant boxes or Docker images and not have the UI come to a halt is fantastic. Easiest option, install a Vagrant box with Ubuntu desktop on it and use it for a day. You'll see if you like it very quickly. |