[khandelwal]

I'm hoping to avoid Dell. Their laptops (at least the ones I've been familiar with) seem to have poor build quality.

[dagw]

Dell's older laptops used to be pretty horrible, but they've made significant improvements and their latest line of higher end business laptops are pretty darn nice.

[joezydeco]

Using a Dell Latitude E6500 and it's pretty solid. Lots of metal.

[sandGorgon]

Very true - I'm using a Quad core E6410 (which I picked up at refurb when I was stateside). Superb machine. Better than recent thinkpads, I would say.

However, I do hit the bug with ubuntu suspend/resume.

[khandelwal]

If I install Ubuntu on it, does pretty much everything work? I don't care too much about suspend/resume, but I do need the wireless to work.

[sandGorgon]

I have not had problems with Dell's wireless for the past 1 year.

If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, I havent seen a Dell laptop where the wireless wasnt out-of-the-box.

[davidw]

Suspend/resume works flawlessly on my E6500. Wireless too.

[joezydeco]

I'm using ubuntu with the fw43-cutter wifi and it's working great. Suspend/resume hasn't been a problem either.

[starbuckt]

Their business laptops (at least the latitudes) are really good. I'd even say that they are better than Thinkpads, but YMMV.

[brudgers]

The Dell Outlet can provide substantial savings if you are a bit patient or lucky.

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/notebooks/ct.aspx?refid=notebo...

[davidw]

I've had decent luck with mine. I did splurge for the extra warranty coverage, so the one time I did have a broken drive, I had a guy at my door (in Innsbruck, Austria) the next morning with a new drive.

[mithaler]

I use a Dell XPS 15-inch with Ubuntu, and I've had a few cosmetic issues but nothing that impaired functionality. Overall I'm quite happy with it and would recommend it to the OP.

[retube]

Seconded. I had a Dell, admittedly a low-end one, and it was dreadful. Crummy build, large pixel size, a ton of bloatware (not that that's relevant if you're going to put linux on it). And the wi-fi under Ubuntu was extremely flaky.