[djanogo]

I am typing this on a 3 year old Dell E6520 running Arch Linux, paid $900 for i7-2720QM, 8GB RAM, and 240GB drive back in 2011, spent another $250 for two 128GB SSD's and 16GB RAM, total of $1150. It came with 3 year Dell business warranty + 1 year extra warranty for using Amex/Discover card. The battery life was about 7 hours initially with 9 cell battery, but I bet latest gen haswell can give 8 hours with much smaller battery.

I would suggest to check out E6540 in Dell outlet, they have 20% to 30% coupons frequently http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySea....

This is coming from somebody who also has a 2014 Retina Macbook Pro, absolutely don't care for it, I keep it closed in the corner of the room and do remote desktop when I need something Mac specific.

[dbla]

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm curious about your choice of Arch. Why did you decide to go with it? Did it require a lot of customization to get up and running or maintenance to keep running?

[djanogo]

Initially had XUbuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE), forgot what exactly happened, but one of the major upgrades (12.10 to 13.10) broke my system, didn't trust those major upgrades anymore, since then I read more about how Arch works and got used to rolling updates. It does require more tweaking to get it running, it forces to learn the "Arch way".

If you are just getting started with Linux then I would suggest to start off with Ubuntu or read up on different distro's. (If you are coming from Windows or Mac, all linux distro's will require some level of tinkering, they just vary on degree.)