Apple's 2016-2019 laptops were pretty unusable, hope they revert the touchbar too..

A question, has anybody tried System76 comparing to Dell/Apple?

I think this is personal taste, but I just don't love the build as much, the trackpad, and ubuntu is acting pretty flaky. The camera and wireless chipsets are not immediately working right.

There just doesn't seem to be a perfect solution.

I also have a lower-spec'ed 2020 XPS 13 laptop (8GB, core I-10) that works perfectly across the board (except for the fingerprint scanner, which I wouldn't use anyway.)

I love the hardware on both. Absolutely love it -- more than my Macbook Air; no sharp edge where I rest my wrists, touch screen, phenomenal screen (4k, which is higher than Retina, or 1080p, which gives better battery life) etc. The 2-in-1 has a taller screen shape, so you can fit more lines in your coding windows.

If you care about camera, get the laptop. It's also a little bit cheaper -- I got it for about $950 from Costco. The only thing I don't like about the laptop is that the screen doesn't tilt all the way back. The keyboard is better on the laptop instead of the 2-in-1 as well -- more depth of travel, and the Delete key is in the right place instead of offset by the fingerprint/power sensor as on the 2-in-1.

I love the new Dell XPS 13 and think both the 2-in-1 and the laptop are better pieces of hardware than the Macbook Air, and I prefer the new Kubuntu 19.04 over Mac OSX as well. (I don't have a MBP so can't compare to the Pro.)

Slightly more pricey, but worth it. Typing this on one.

I've not noticed any hiccups or problems at all around encryption.

On the other hand, I've never tried System76, and never heard of Tuxedo, thank you for mentioning!

My only beef is no NVME and it stutters a tad. If I could find a 2015 w/ 16gb/1 tb spec w/ NVME...

I'm hoping the glitches in the 16" can be worked out, eager to see how the 14.1 will look...

and I know Apple kremlinology is never the most accurate way to look at things, but boy were the Mansfield/Forstall years great...

The only problem is battery degradation (70%) and in reality it lasts <2 hours. But since I use it at home as a desktop, not a problem at all!

I've done this on a '14 13" MBP so I can help if you have any questions.

The latest XPSs look very nice.

[0] the drive management software didn't like GRUB, and would complain that there was no drive if GRUB was installed. Repeated reboots later, it would suddenly say "oh look, a hard drive!" and boot into Windows, removing GRUB in the process. Dell Support were worse than useless at diagnosing the problem, let alone fixing it (still unfixed, the machine is now a rather shitty games machine)

Signing 3rd party kernel modules under secure boot isn't difficult, but documentation on it is sparse. So I've kept my notes for next time: https://lawler.io/scrivings/linux-cookbooks/

The Arch guys have a great compendium on the XPS and Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_7590

I shrank the 1TB SSD partition in Windows, disabled the proprietary fake-RAID, then booted Fedora's XFCE spin from a USB key. The installer handled everything else--no having to manually tinker with the UEFI partition. Post-install, the XPS's UEFI correctly booted to GRUB, which had successfully detected the Windows bootloader (again, no tinkering like with FC20) and can boot either OS.

Disabling hibernate in Windows and figuring out how to mount the encrypted Windows partition in Fedora was all that remained.

The Linux Kernel 5.5 has a bunch of improvements for the i7-9750H (and other Coffee Lake processors), which is another reason to consider giving Fedora 31 a spin. :)

I had this pleasant experience the same time I was trying to figure out how to dual-boot FC31 on a touch bar MacBook Pro. The short answer is: 80% of the MBP's hardware doesn't work in Linux. Broadcom won't release drivers that are compatible with Linux and blame FCC rules for their reason. Insane. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

For grub-uefi, it is just another file on a EFI system partition.

I enjoy this machine and would buy another.

Also, I had a windows edition which works pretty bad with linux. A friend of mine got a new Linux edition with fixed camera and I think perfect XPS is 15" 32Gb for linux. That's my alternative #1

At the end I stuck to my MacBook Pro 2015. Perfect Size Trackpad with Zero false positive. Most people put up with a few false positive on the larger TrackPad. But I dont see any reason why this have to be this way. The keyboard felt way better, even the new Magic Keyboard on MBP 16 felt exactly the same as butterfly. Touch Bar is Junk, again it sometimes freeze. And some people put up with it thinking it is a non issue.

The old Apple and its users used to be perfectionist. Nowadays a lot of people settle for mediocre.

I just wish they make MacBook Pro Classic. Just throw in a new CPU will do.

Fortunately so

Good luck!

I'm not sure if it was the wifi chipset or the antenna design, and maybe some of the higher end Dells with better radio chipsets would perform better, but I returned the laptop to Dell and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy that was. At least they're doing something right. After that, I picked up a $700 ThinkPad T-series for travel and the reception is great on it.

It's faster than my Air, mostly from going 8 -> 16GB of RAM, and the high-resolution screen is great. But it still feels pretty slow and IntelliJ can get sluggish at times. The MBP has a 3.1GHz i7 so at least on paper it doesn't seem materially slower from the current gen of processors. Maybe memory speed is the issue? 1867 MHz DDR3 vs 3733MHz LPDDR4X in the new Air?

I miss the 11" form factor, but I guess that's a lost cause.

The 2015 MBP bought me (cheap) a couple years while Apple sorts out their keyboard issues, but I'm already looking forward to a replacement. It's just ok.

Overall, I found the speed of this model far exceeded my 2017 MBP from my last job, but it's kinda surprising how frequently the monitors / keyboard / mouse encounter connection issues.

That being said, I feel like I'm being a little picky, especially when I think of how nightmarish it was to get any of this shit to work with my Windows machines. It's the exception rather than the rule that anything would work the first time as expected (monitors / keyboards / mice / printers / programs).

It would be different if it had always been like this with Apple. The older models show that it used to work pretty much flawlessly. It is such a big step backwards and just because other manufacturers are crap at it doesn't make it okay. :)

I feel like I could live with the performance issues. But I'm doing a lot of switching between offices and having external screen/mouse/keyboard not working straight away is such a major pain. Even sometimes during the day after walking off with the laptop and coming back to the desk it doesn't work. It could be my specific setup but then Apple doesn't sell any official docking setups either AFAIK.