Gentlemen,

I'm in the need of buying a high end laptop with a good configuration i.e core i7/16GB ram/SSD yada yada. I have had many laptops over the years but yet to find a laptop that would meet my expectations with regards to performance, weight and other concerns.

Now I'm Thinking of a Appele macbook pro with 15.6

I have been a Linux Engineer for 8+ year. Most certainly I'm not trying to switch to something else here but looking for a workhorse grade machine to continue living my life in the world of linux. Oh all these years I have been using Ubuntu in my laptops and been a heavy user of oracle virtualbox for my R & D work on security, web services, perl scripting, system administration and etc which I'd continue to do so.

What are your thoughts about a linux user making a switch to a Macbook, good people? Or should I just go for something like HP elitebook which they say is good even though I dont like it. I'm sure at least one of you experts would have been in my shoes at one point in life so please help me out taking a decision.

Many thanks in advance.

/B

Hi,

I can't comment on Macbooks but I've been using a System76 Kudu pro with i7, 16 GB ram and a 1 TB SSD since the start of the year and have been extremely happy with it. The Kudu is a 17 inch machine, but they also have a 15.6 inch machine that you can spec out the same as the Kudu. See https://system76.com/laptops/model/gazp9

There is also the bonus that you are supporting a small manufacturer that ships Linux and not a giant one arguably questionable business practices.

HTH,

Evo2.

Thanks Evo will look in to what you've suggested. Im all ears good people, keep your ideas flowing in.

hi, i recently bought an HP Envy 103el, 15,6" with HD resolution intel i7 4700MQ (quad core), 16Gb of ram NVIDIA graphic card (optimus) and 1TB HDD, but i took an SSD Samsung pro 256Gb, now powered with Slackware64 14.1.
Notebook is very nice, thin with aluminium case, BUT is for "home" users althrogh elitebook was made for enterprise level.

I have a Zareason Strata that absolutely rocks. The purchasable options include an upgrade to an i7 processor and 16GB RAM.

Unlike most other vendors of native Linux machines, Zareason allows you to pick your distro.

I live in both the Mac and Linux world you're likely not going to find a better computer all things considered than a MacBook Pro.

Don't pay the Apple Tax. The only thing they have going for them IMO is the 1 piece aluminum unibody. The rest is off the shelf hardware that you are paying 50% more for give or take. Not sure Linux can drive retina so that is also a lost expense.

*EDIT* Aren't the ram and ssd part of the main board now to. So you can't upgrade it without replacing it. And if you want it, say 16gb of ram or bigger ssd you better buy it from the start.

SSD's are available aftermarket and on ebay, RAM is soldiered.

I have arch running on a Macbook Pro 8,2. It's really nice hardware but it has its problems. It certainly wasn't an easy job to do as a semi noob linux user but as you're a bit more experienced maybe it would be easier for you. The biggest problem I had was heating. I had to tinker all possible options everywhere to calm it down. It's now about half year since I installed linux on my mac for the first time and I'm now starting to be satisfied. The only real problem still is the battery life which is about 3 - 4 hours but I have heard that some people have been successful getting it up to 7 - 9 hours.

Every time I get ready to purchase another laptop I do look at the Apple website and they are pretty.
With the being said it'd prefer need a work horse of a laptop not a laptop I have to be very gentle with.
I've owned a Thinkpad T60 since 2006 and it still works without issue. I maxed out MB and OS since it came with XP on it and replaced the battery twice over the years.

I would recommend a Lenovo Thinkpad (RedHat staff have used these for a while now) or Dell Latitude series.
Check this out: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops...tab-tech_specs
If you want to spend $9-$1,500 and for something you can't replace the battery on- then Apple will work for you.

@ Germany Chris,

I have a similar problem. I just bought a MacPro Laptop and I am thinking of running two opeating Systems on it-Mac OS and Linux-Suse maybe. So i am thinking of partitioning the hard disc so i can have both OS installed. Do you have any experience with doing this? Is this something you would advice I do?

Thanks!
Jimmy

In my experience the easiest way is refit/refind then create a boot camp partition install windows then install linux over the Windows install. OSX cannot read ext4 so you can't select it from the normal boot menu that's why you need the bootcamp. I haven't done it in while but there are threads on the Arch forum about it so I imagine the suse forum will have the same. You could also go to Mac Rumors they have a whole section there about running other OS's on Macs.