[thelittlelisper]

My favorite options are the Air (11 / 13) and Thinkpad x220.

Other options include Thinkpad x230 (newer than the x220) but worse keyboard, x1 Carbon, Dell XPS, Chromebook Pixel, Asus and Samsung.

I ended up buying both an Air 11 (my own money) and a x220 (my employer). Both machines are really well supported under Linux (most hardware is Intel). The only drawback is their low resolution screen, which IMHO is not a dealbreaker given how small they are.

I manage to achieve 5-6W in both, which leads to stunning battery peformance. This requires some powertop monitoring and some simple tweaks.

x220 is great because it is serviceable, has an IPS screen, a full keyboard, a non-ULV processor, better connectivity, and a more sturdy design.

The Air has a much better touchpad, is more silent, and comes with a blazing fast SSD from Toshiba (64 or 128 versions).

[abelsson]

I personally would get an Air over a x220 after having used the x220 for the last 6 months. The x220 is my fourth Thinkpad over the years, and it looks just like the X30 I got 10 years ago.

And honestly, the design has not kept up with the times. For its weight class, it's pretty big, thick and clumsy. The trackpad is atrocious (that's not a problem if you like trackpoints, but my fingers end up hurting after an hour of using them). I also found the x220 quite slow, and the fan spends a lot of time running even with just basic browsing. Battery life is decent though, it probably won't break just by you looking at it sideways, and the keyboard is good - its a classic Thinkpad. But next to a modern Ultrabook it looks quite dated.

However, if I were to spend my own money, the Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu edition looks appealing. I haven't had a chance to try it though.

[Erwin]

I've had the new XPS for about 2 weeks now. It's nice and light, good screen. Worked with Ubuntu out of the box except hibernate -- which ran into some problems with encrypted swap before it could work (could be my fault for saying Yes to encrypted home dir when setting up the preloaded Ubuntu). I gave up on the trackpad though (maybe it can be tweaked to be usable), and am using a mouse. I never liked the trackpad on my previous laptop (some kind of netbook) nor the trackpad or the red thingy on the solid Thinkpad T42.

With an i7, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD it's nice and fast. Suspend, hibernate are quick. Sound is decent.

I tried an Asus zenbook and the Samsung series 9 in a store, and was not happy about the keyboard. I think the Dell XPS keyboard is nice. Not as nice as on my 2005 Thinkpad, but the XPS is far lighter and thinner.

Here in Denmark it was hard to find a good selection of laptops to try in store. My other alternative was the X1 carbon... but I really wanted something that worked with Ubuntu out of the box with 100% guarantee.

Overall, it feels solid and sleek yet light (1.4 kg or so). It fits into the same tiny Victorinox laptop bag that my 2009 10" netbook fit into, yet it is much more powerful (of course, also 3x the price).

I found one wifi hotspot that the Ubuntu or wifi hardware mysteriously refused to connect to, where I had to connect via my Galaxy S3 phone and share the connection via the USB port (which worked pretty well).

While the screen is nice, I've increased the font size to "Large" in Ubuntu's universal access settings, and have zoomed in on several web pages with Chrome. So I'm not yet sure about the benefit of the high resolution screen (Linus Torvalds however swears to his Pixel and its 2560x1440 or so screen).

[ne0phyte]

Why would you use a touchpad if you have a trackpoint? Get used to the trackpoint: less fatigue, faster and more exact control of the cursor and more ergonomic since your fingers pretty much stay on the homerow = less wrist movement (unless you use your thumb).

[thelittlelisper]

I'm not saying I would. I prefer the trackpoint. But they should provide a decent trackpad or get rid of it altogether. I don't need both. This would make more space for palmrest, which is too small in x220.

[leashless]

I have an x220 but I haven't been able to get the power consumption that low. I have tried quite a few things. Could you suggest a link/reference/method please?

[thelittlelisper]

Just 3 things:

- Install powertop and enable all suggested tweaks

- Depending on your kernel you should downclock your i915 graphics card and force pcie_aspm

- Later kernels (>3.6?) have a power regression which leads to higher consumption in Sandy Intel architectures

[thelittlelisper]

These are my energy tweaks for a 2008 MacBook, I don't have my x220 here, although they are machine independent:

echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog

echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save for i in /sys/bus//devices//power/control; do echo auto > $i; done for i in /sys/class/scsi_host//link_power_management_policy; do echo min_power > $i; done

for i in /sys/class/rfkill//soft; do echo 1 > $i; done

For the kernel parameters, a simple Google search should get you going.

What's the watt consumption you achieve? I must note I run Arch Linux with Xmonad and no desktop environment.

[leashless]

Ahahah. Ok, ok, yes, I'm running Unity on off-the-shelf Ubuntu. I bet you're getting much better battery performance than I am!

[thelittlelisper]

Well, running a lightweight desktop helps. I cannot say how much, though. Try monitoring wakeups using powertop while your machine is iddling. Anything above 30 or 40 is bad.