To some extent, yes. But the demo that I occupy (male, 30s, software developer, linux enthusiast, seeker of high quality hardware that is highly compatible with linux), is desperate and hungry for this.

I thought that was IBM think Pads

Exactly. I've been using a Thinkpad for my Arch build for years and it's stellar. Does IBM need to shit on Apple like that too? Or are these guys straight out of high school?

Don’t forget Dell’s ”Project Sputnik” XPS13 Developer Edition. My sister (!) has been using one since 2015 and it’s rick solid.

Yes, to be honest, I'm quite excited by it.

If only they did plain arch linux (just hard drives partitioned sensibly and graphics drivers installed, maybe X installed) and a nice thin 15 inch version...

Actually, I'd rather like purchasing the notebook with an empty disk, then have the supplier maintain a page in the Arch wiki on what drivers I need etc. (These pages already exist for some models, but only as a community effort.)

When you say "just hard drives partitioned sensibly and graphics drivers installed, maybe X installed", I hear "probably wrong bootloader, probably wrong partition layout, probably wrong FS choice" and so on and so on ("wrong" in this particular case meaning "not what I prefer").

After all, Arch is a distribution for tinkerers who want their system their way.

You make a very nice point. Even an AUR package that just installs the drivers would be great!

Yes this would be an amazing offering that I don't think I could resist.

My XPS 13 9360 was $900. Arch runs like a dream on it.

I spent $1300 on a System76 laptop about 5 years ago and have been extremely satisfied* with it.

* Except for the Nvidia hardware, which never really worked right. I'm using unaccelerated (?) Nouveau drivers as the least bad option.

That's what stood out for me about all the StationX except for the Spitfire: they have nVidia GPUs. Having dicked around with nouveau and nvidia/dkms with various nVidia chips I will never buy anything with closed-source/binary-blob. It's just not worth my time.

>for linux users

>with nvidia graphics

Wow. What were they thinking? I'll have to assume every other decision they made is about as moronic.

You don't get a line of laptops off the ground overnight. AMD/ATI linux drivers not sucking is a fairly recent development. If were making this decision ~5 years ago, Nvidia would be a reasonable choice.

I spent about $1000 on a Sager 6 years ago, and was very happy with it (including the Nvidia hardware; it was tough to get running in Optimus mode, but works well now).

Last year it had a spate of corrupted video output, with red static all over the screen. Went on for about a week, and I bought a new laptop...then the problems with the Sager disappeared. All well. I think it's still the most maintainable laptop that I own.