[mcrute]

Dell XPS 13" 9370 running Fedora 29 at home 9380 running Ubuntu 18.04 at work. Formerly MacBook Pros. I'd recommend the Dell XPS 9370 and Fedora 29 combo as a decent Mac alternative.

I've run Linux systems for a little over 20 years now and have historically found the Linux laptop experience to be pretty painful, full of driver incompatabilities and other annoyances like non-functional suspend. So when Apple transitioned the Mac to Unix-like OS and Intel chips I hopped on board and was a huge Mac fan. Early on in the 10.x series Mac OS was a great Unix operating system with a nicely functional desktop environment, most stuff just worked without a bunch of hacking. Over the years, though, Apple has been gutting the core of Mac OS and replacing it with their own proprietary APIs that lack Linux compatibility (OpenSSL, OpenGL, OpenCL, etc...). Homebrew and Docker can spackle over some of this but it seems quite a hack, especially given that most production work I do runs on some variant of Linux. At the end of the day most of the tools I use heavily are open source and run on Linux and those that don't have reasonable open source alternatives (1password vs pass, for example) so I migrated.

On the work front I've been using Linux desktops since around 2006 and have been keeping tabs on the desktop experience. It's improved a ton over the past few years. As much as it pains me to say this systemd has helped a lot. In my experience Dell hardware has mostly had decent Linux compatibility because they rely heavily on Intel chips and Intel puts a lot of work into the Linux kernel. The Dell Sputnik hardware has helped even more since the whole system is Linux certified by Dell (well Ubuntu certified, but all the patches make it to upstream) which makes a huge difference for things just working. The unpatched mainline kernel just works on Sputnik hardware without any hacking in my experience.

In my recent experience Fedora is an easier distribution to run because they keep packages very up-to-date whereas Ubuntu has inherited the slower release cadence of Debian. Neither are unpleasant but Fedora has required less configuration to make it work. There are a few minor annoyances so far but nothing that can't be fixed. Suspend defaults to suspend-to-ram, which is IMO wrong but configuring it to suspend-then-hibernate (sleep to RAM for an hour of inactivity then wake up and hibernate to disk/power off) is just a config file edit. Apple accessories (can't break up with my Magic Trackpad) require really recent kernel versions (4.20+) to work reliably and then some X configuration on top of that. The Atheros wireless cards can be a little flaky around suspend/resume/unexpected device behavior (this is Atheros or the driver's fault, hopefully Dell ditches them for Intel soon). Projectors, printing, pretty much everything else has just worked without any issues at all.