[chris_j]

I run Fedora 20 on a Thinkpad W530 at work and have few complaints. It's a high speed machine, is well built and, aside from a few hassles running the proprietary driver for the nvidia graphics card, it just worked from day 1.

[jlgaddis]

I'm running Arch Linux on the same machine (quad-core, 32 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD + 500 GB SATA) and it flies. It does have the Optimus graphics stuff but I haven't bothered with it.

(I'd been using MBPs exclusively for several years when I bought the W530 (in May 2013), hadn't touched my MBP in over a year and finally got rid of it a few months ago.)