I'm hoping to avoid Dell. Their laptops (at least the ones I've been familiar with) seem to have poor build quality.

Dell's older laptops used to be pretty horrible, but they've made significant improvements and their latest line of higher end business laptops are pretty darn nice.

Using a Dell Latitude E6500 and it's pretty solid. Lots of metal.

Very true - I'm using a Quad core E6410 (which I picked up at refurb when I was stateside). Superb machine. Better than recent thinkpads, I would say.

However, I do hit the bug with ubuntu suspend/resume.

If I install Ubuntu on it, does pretty much everything work? I don't care too much about suspend/resume, but I do need the wireless to work.

I have not had problems with Dell's wireless for the past 1 year.

If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, I havent seen a Dell laptop where the wireless wasnt out-of-the-box.

Suspend/resume works flawlessly on my E6500. Wireless too.

I'm using ubuntu with the fw43-cutter wifi and it's working great. Suspend/resume hasn't been a problem either.

Their business laptops (at least the latitudes) are really good. I'd even say that they are better than Thinkpads, but YMMV.

The Dell Outlet can provide substantial savings if you are a bit patient or lucky.

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/notebooks/ct.aspx?refid=notebo...

I've had decent luck with mine. I did splurge for the extra warranty coverage, so the one time I did have a broken drive, I had a guy at my door (in Innsbruck, Austria) the next morning with a new drive.

I use a Dell XPS 15-inch with Ubuntu, and I've had a few cosmetic issues but nothing that impaired functionality. Overall I'm quite happy with it and would recommend it to the OP.

Seconded. I had a Dell, admittedly a low-end one, and it was dreadful. Crummy build, large pixel size, a ton of bloatware (not that that's relevant if you're going to put linux on it). And the wi-fi under Ubuntu was extremely flaky.