[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).