I own a ZBook 15 (2014) and it's very good. The bad points are the keyboard with a number pad (I'd pay an extra for one without it, MacBook style) and (less important) the 16:9 form factor of the screen (anything taller is better and the screen has a lot of vertical bezel).

The good points are that's fast enough for my job (mostly backend web development) and easily expandable. I eventually maxed up the RAM to 32 GB, replaced the HDD and DVD with 2 SSD, replaced the keyboard (this is the 6th year of the laptop) and I know I could replace the CPU and the GPU if I care. It runs Ubuntu well.

Somebody could dislike its 3 kg and the 0.8 kg power brick, its thickness and the about 3 hours battery time but they're less important to me than expandability and the 3 buttons touchpad. I work from home most of the time. By the way, the battery apparently didn't lose any capacity along these years.

https://www.ifixit.com/Device/HP_ZBook_15

The newest models improved on many of the good points and some of the last ones I wrote about. The keyboard still has the number pad. I'm considering a 14" model to get rid of it.

I also have an old ZBook 15 and must say I'm also pretty happy with it.

The weight is a massive pain, 3.3 Kg for mine, but on average I take it somewhere once every couple of months at most so I can live with it.

The big plus is that I haven't had to buy a new machine in close to 5 years and performance is on par with my Dell at work and certainly better that my crappy surface book 2 at my previous place.

The Spectre laptops are pretty dang nice and are Linux-friendly. The dark-and-copper one looks fantastic, too. I'd be using one right now, instead of a Thinkpad T480, if they didn't put Ctrl and Fn in the wrong places. (My hands just can't re-learn that one.)

You can easily swap the functionality of the two keyboard keys in the BIOS settings of your laptop (you must do something like this: https://www.geek.com/chips/how-to-swap-the-fn-and-ctrl-keys-...). The funny thing is that I am the only one in our company that did this, meaning that when a colleague tries to use my keyboard, they fail in 95% of the case. It's always funny to see this happen, but my colleagues get often fustrated. You have been warned ;)

I tried this at the time. Mine lacked the option (the 2017 13" model). It was really frustrating.

I have to second this - I got a late 2016 Spectre X360 and it's been my daily driver since.

Though I have to say that the ability to open it up is less than ideal.

Because of a leaky water bottle and a surprisingly waterproof bag I managed to soak my week-old laptop for about 12 hours.

There's only two screws on the bottom, and they're covered by rubber feet. The problem is that only two of the four rubber feet are removable - removing the other two breaks a clip, meaning I had to superglue them back on.

After drying it out over the forced-air vents of a server-room for a few days, it was a-ok.

I suffer from a similarly idiotic keyboard. I think the name of the “Fn” key is quite appropriate. (As in this F ing key is where CTRL should be!)

When did Fn become a thing? I still haven't gotten used to it.

Pretty sure they've been a thing for at least 20 years now, if not longer.

HP makes both great and terrible laptops. Their higher end professional laptops (like the Z series laptops) have always been solid, well built and easy to update. Their more consumer focused laptops have always been complete garbage.

I have a Z-series laptop and an elite book (same generation, Haswell CPUs)

The zbook is just garbage. Hot garbage. We had all of them fail due to woefully inadequate cooling. Only 2 are still working (out of 10)

The elitebook 820g2 is better. I have the only surviving one there though.

My ZBook from 2014 is still working and it's 30C in summer here, until I switch on the air conditioner. Which model did you buy and from which year? I'm asking to know if I should steer clear from newer models.

Weird, the company I used to work at had probably 100+ Z-series laptops of various generations 2013-2018 and, with very few exceptions, they all performed great.

Yes they are, one of the reasons they need to be serviceable probably.

Hey, hold on there. Their printers are great, the HP1020 was a superb domestic B&W laser.