The issue that made me give up the XPS 13 for personal use was that Linux still doesn't support having a secondary monitor at a lower pixel density. I tried about 5 different distros, they all looked terrible, so I had to return the XPS and get a MacBook that I knew would work just fine. Other than that the laptop was beautiful.

I simply scale the external display using xrandr --scale 2x2 (or similar, you can specify fractions).

Works way better than expected and I use it ten hours a day. At some point, Wayland solves this natively, but in the meantime this is an acceptable workaround.

It's crazy there is no obvious UI for this. xrandr can do so much more than the typical monitor settings panel.

They say you have to wait for Wayland for this to work correctly.

Yep, that's why I decided to return the laptop and wait until Wayland is the default on Fedora to try again. I love Linux, used it for years as my main OS, but it's hard to beat the convenience of OS X when it comes to productivity. I don't miss all the time spent trying to get music to play without audible clicks caused by faulty drivers, setting up my computer so it'd remember where my desk monitor is in relation to the laptop monitor, getting wi-fi drivers to stop dropping packets, etc.

I got mine yesterday. Replaced the preinstalled Ubuntu 14.04 LTs with Arch Linux and I was shocked how well everything worked. So far I haven't found a single thing that doesn't work and having installed Linux on a lot of laptops in the past that's truly not something I would expect. Apart from the icons in the Gnome app tray I haven't seen any issues with HiDPI either.

Agreed. I run Fedora as my main VM and it has been pretty damn solid. I tried dual booting and had some NVidia problems, but otherwise it was okay.

It is 80% there, and if I didn't just get a MBP from work, I'd probably spend some more time with Fedora outside the VM.

Either way, if MS doesn't clean up their act, I'm done with Windows after a long time of daily use.

except fonts...

Short version: a lot of us don't even think about the fonts as long as we have and ordinary monospaced one when we edit code.

Long version: It seems there are two kinds of people here:

Some like me never think about any font that finds its way into any mainstream distro.

Others seems to care deeply about them.

I find it useful to keep this in mind as I honestly find one of the highly praised Mac a usability disaster (tried honestly to work with it or around it for almost three years).

I ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years. I always used the same distro on the servers as I did on my desktop, just to keep it consistent. I changed a dozen machines over to a new distro, at one point, because I couldn't get my fonts to look good. So, yeah, I'm one of "those people."

Sure, but that doesn't mean improvement can't happen.

I personally would love to see a proper graphics application. I would use linux as my main PC in a heartbeat if a Sketch equivalent was available. I expect a lot of people have similar feelings or have one thing keeping them from completely making the jump.

Yep, my point is only that we shouldn't discourage people from trying because it looks awful and jarring - a lot of us don't recognize that and loves thise Linux distros. :-)

I'm one of those people that just can't tolerate ugly fonts. It drives me insane.

I recently got a MBP and the fonts are great. In 2016, Linux needs this fixed.

Fellow font-blind person here. It's hard for me to understand the intense emotional response other people have to fonts. I couldn't care less about fonts than I do about the colour of the circuit board my CPU is soldered on.

As a programmer, how can you not care? You stare at it all day.

That's like saying some art dealers don't care what paintings look like. They just sell the stuff.

I understand this might sound weird but I just don't think about fonts. In my head that is designer territory and ever since I realised I was colourweak and couldn't be one anyway I stopped even trying.

I know three types that I use: serif, sans-serif and monospaced programming fonts.

I do however care a lot about keyboard layouts, keyboard shortcuts and general snappiness of the OS so I am definitely a programmer ;-)

Edit: and I'm not a graphics programmer so I'm not an "art dealer" anyway, more like someone in logistics. :-)

There are definitely art dealers that don't care about what the paintings look like, and just want what sells. Personally, as long as it's readable...

This is one of the things I really love about Ubuntu. Ubuntu monospace is the most readable and unambiguous monospace font I've ever seen.

Out of the box Fedora has ugly fonts but that is easily fixed with Fedy http://folkswithhats.org/ takes two minutes and you have beautiful fonts just like Ubuntu :)

It doesn't matter on high DPI displays by the way.

The fonts on Fedora 24 on the XPS 13 is brilliant. I think gnome and freetype has improved to the level that the rendering is excellent.

Can confirm, with a Thinkpad T460s. Better than Windows and OS X.

Freetype's grayscale rendering works great on higher DPI displays, even the 1080P display on my 2013 Dell XPS 13 is sufficiently dense for me to not notice, and with some recent improvements in Fedora 24 I hardly notice the lack of subpixel rendering even on my 24" display at home (though it's still somewhat irksome, debating installing freetype-freeworld again).

I definitely noticed on Thinkpad's 14" 1600x900 display. However, after installing freetype-freeworld and configuring rgba rendering, the font rendering is better than Windows or OSX.