About 6 years ago I gave up on Apple laptops and switched to Linux full
time. When I’m at home, I prefer to work on a well-equipped desktop with a
large monitor and one of my beloved Kinesis Advantage keyboards. But I am on
the road a lot for work and so I need to do a lot of hacking on the go.
My initial reasons for giving up on OS X / macOS were due to my frustrations
around developer tooling and package management, problems now largely solved by
Homebrew. I got tired of being able to easily do certain kind of development on
Linux and then struggle to get all the required pieces set up in the same way
on OS X. Then, as soon as Homebrew began to resolve all that, Apple decided to
ruin its laptops through the introduction of the awful and annoyingly-loud
butterfly keyboard and touchbar.
I’ve used a variety of Linux laptops over the last 6 years and wanted to share
a bit of my experience to help others who are considering being Linux-only, or
maybe are looking to buy their next Linux laptop. These laptops include:
- Lenovo Thinkpad X230
- Lenovo Thinkpad X250
- Dell Precision 5510 (2016 era) with Ubuntu 14.04 certified pre-install
- Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (2017 era)
- Dell XPS 15 (2017 era)
- Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (6th generation)
- Lenovo Thinkpad P1 15.6″ (2018 era)
- Precision 5540 (2019 era) with Ubuntu 18.04 certified pre-install
I just spent the better part of this past year year struggling with the
Thinkpad P1, Lenovo’s latest effort to compete with Dell’s XPS 15 and Precision
5500 line. I had had a Precision 5510 in the past, which had been my favorite
laptop of all time, except for some small issues that led me to explore
Lenovo’s latest.
I was talking with the Dell folks recently about my experiences with (and
general fussiness regarding) Linux laptops and they offered to send me a new
Precision 5540 to give them constructive feedback. After a few days with the
new machine, it was obvious that it was the machine for me and I shut down my
Thinkpad P1 for good.
The rest of this post will be comparing the P1 and 5540 to hopefully help other
developers make a decision a
