Have a look at the Dell offerings.

The Developer Edition of the XPS 13 is a linux-first example: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...

(This post made from an XPS-13 7390 with a standard-HD display. The standard display is quite pleasant to use. The keyboard is wonderful compared to my crouton Chromebook of the past. The fit, finish, and operation of the device is the nicest I've used.)

Oh that's funny, I have the same laptop with you!

$ neofetch --off

  sscarduzio@nash 
  --------------- 
  OS: Ubuntu 20.10 x86_64 
  Host: XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 
  Kernel: 5.8.0-40-generic 
  Uptime: 3 days, 10 hours, 34 mins 
  Packages: 3506 (dpkg), 14 (flatpak), 27 (snap) 
  Shell: bash 5.0.17 
  Resolution: 1920x1200 
  DE: GNOME 
  WM: Mutter 
  WM Theme: Yaru-dark 
  Theme: Yaru-dark [GTK2/3] 
  Icons: Yaru [GTK2/3] 
  Terminal: gnome-terminal 
  CPU: Intel i7-1065G7 (8) @ 3.900GHz 
  GPU: Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7 
  Memory: 7620MiB / 15781MiB 

I use fractional scaling hidpi (1.3x) and no issues at all. But coming from a 2015 MBP 13" retina display, I can definitely tell the difference, and the MBP was much nicer to look at.

I opted fro the FHD+ instead of the 4K screen in my Dell for two reasons:

- 4K is *WAY* beyond Retina, which is already very dense for me.

- I was afraid the 4K would drain the battery (especially on Linux)

I really hope Dell will offer a sane ~3K display (i.e. Retina levels) in the future and remove the burden of choice for their customers (at least where it's not needed).

Before you ask: no coil whine for me, but the thin rubber feet peeled off after exactly one year. This pissed me off on a £2K laptop.

Any coil whine?

I haven't noticed any particular noise from the unit. I'm in my late thirties, so if it is at the higher end of human hearing, perhaps those particular cilia are gone, but I'm happy. Placing my ear on the keyboard doesn't detect anything either.

It has been the better part of a decade since I've had a laptop with a fan, so that is a little bit different, but I only notice it under higher loads.

Yes, it exists. However it is my daily driver and I've all but tuned it out months ago.

It's really not as big a deal some make it out to be.

> This is a monumental deal breaker for the majority of people.

I highly doubt that a laptop not supporting >1080p on the monitor is considered a 'monumental deal breaker for the majority of people'.

1080p is just fine for laptops.

the screen on the Serval WS is 144hz, as well, which is much higher refresh-rate than most HiDpi displays.

I write text documents for a living. 4k at 60hz is what I need and it works perfectly from Ubuntu Mate on a Dell laptop. I'd never go back to 1080.

i write code for a living, so I'm in a similar boat. all my screens are 1080p and I don't have any problems.

my point was that this is actually not a deal breaker for most users. just a deal breaker for some users. I would venture to say they are even in the minority.

Right, we can do without a lot of nice features. For example, I could do without a modern editor, maybe get by with gedit or something similar. But I don't... the value I get from them is much greater than the money spent.

My laptop display upgrade was maybe $200 five years ago. It has payed that back in clarity (and the amount of code I can see at once) every single day since.

I am typing this on a Dell XPS 15 w/ a 4K OLED running Gentoo .

But more to your point, yes, there are few laptops with good screens that have awesome Linux compatibility. They exist, certainly, but there are not too many of them.

I have to ask, what compelled you to use Gentoo as your daily driver? I haven’t touched Gentoo in many years, but it was not something I would ever consider as a desktop distribution based off that experience. Has something changed?

To be honest, not really.

Where I work we run Gentoo on all our servers because we have many changes across the Linux stack and deal with custom, internal hardware. We have build profiles for various system configurations that are entirely reproducible on a binary level. It made sense since we have many similar or identical systems globally and need access to the latest kernel versions.

I installed it on all my personal systems to force myself to learn how to use it. I ran Arch on everything previously. Then I went and did something stupid - I fell in love with Gentoo's package management system. As someone who writes a lot of code on my own time as well, I found Gentoo's package manager (portage) to be the least headache inducing of all the ones I'd used (deb, rpm, PKGBUILD). This is my own subjective opinion obviously.

Is there much difference when looking at text on an 13" screen between 1080p and 2160p ? assuming both are high quality screens.

Yes there is! Because in the MBP 13" at 2160p I could keep 2x scaling, which is much better than this 1.3x/1.5x fractional scaling I have to keep in the Dell XPS 13".

Assuming you have good eyes, twice the DPI means you can have your text almost-but-not-quite twice as small without losing readability. Which is effectively the same as giving you almost-but-not-quite twice the screen real-estate.

Do you like smooth or blocky text?