In your position, I'd stick with Linux. Familiarity is worth a lot. I'm stuck using Winblows at work for the nonce (long story), and aside from the general horribleness of it, the loss of habituation really, really hurts.

I love me my new Buffle (who isn't even a Pro, just a regular MacBook), but I don't see enough advantage even in the shiny, shiny Mac OS for you.

Personally, I'd go with the ThinkPad. I've had the T21, T30, T41 and now a T60. All have been VERY stable and reliable...I just upgrade for performance gains when new hardware comes out. Also, Linux support is pretty good on these, though I have had problems in the past with WiFi. Nothing a little googling won't fix though. The keyboard and the TrackPoint are the best you can find, IMHO.

I have an HP dv9000 as well, but not as tricked out as your specs. It's running Ubuntu with no problems at all. Though I find the keyboard kinda mushy and my fat digits tend to get caught under the keys when I type fast.

My two cents...

I currently use a HP nw9440 (1680x1050, didn't get my boss to pay for the better display) and am quite satisfied with it.

The only issues I've had so far are Bluetooth problems (apparently an extra driver is needed) and I haven't played around with suspending yet. Otherwise it's worked really well.

It even has a trackpoint (although I hardly use it).

Just my .02 €

Hi Norm,

Ask anyone you know that has a Macbook. I'm one of them and couldn't be happier. I bought a copy of Parallels and I have Ubuntu and Windows XP running as well. Once you switch to a Macbook, you'll never look back. And for screen size, the 15" is fine but I still use 20" flat at home with an external keyboard --my whole set is probaly still cheaper than a 17" inch Macbook and the 15" is much better for travelling.

Dell Latitude D820 comes with a trackpoint (they call it a "track stick") and optional WUXGA.

I've been using 1920x1200 on a Dell Inspiron 6000 (no longer sold, and no Inspiron model currently supports WUXGA) and would hate to settle for less.

linux is fantastic, but be careful about video drivers - get one with Intel video, or at least avoid ATIAMD since their drivers are extremely slow, buggy, and will make your firefox take 5 seconds to render a page.

both thinkpads i had fell apart, so far the MSI barebones is very sturdy (magnesium i think) and nothing has gone wrong with it even after 1.5 years, being jostled around in backpacks on subways etc..

also emacs runs great on winXP, as does bash, rxvt, ssh, scp, gcc, gtk, etc. mingw is a great project

Santiago, I just got a nicely appointed 15" MacBook Pro for work. This is my first mac, I'm mainly coming from the linux/windows world.

I have to tell you, I really dislike this thing. It is amazingly unresponsive - switching between windows actually takes several second, and it often lags behind keystrokes! There is very likely something wrong in the setup - I've chatted with several others from work with the same laptop that have the same problems.

So far I'm extremely disappointed. Hopefully it's a setup thing and can be fixed, but as it stands it's almost unusable. If I don't find a solution in the next week I'll be wiping off OSX and installing windows or linux on the thing.

To top it off it doesn't have a standard pcmcia slot, which means I can't use my verizon broadband card for nationwide internet access.

I paid 1100 euros (ex. sales tax) for my Dell Inspiron 6400. It’s about a year old now and got an Intel Core Duo @ 2GHz, 1GB of memory, 100GB 7200 RPM HD, WSXGA, wireless, DVD burner, and an ATI mobility X1400 graphics card (with which I can run the games I’ve played so far at native LCD resolution). And the thing has a 4-hour battery life.

That was pretty much the latest and the greatest you could get then (Intel Core 2 wasn’t out yet). Now, one year later, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that for the same money you can get the same specs with Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB of memory.

So, those numbers you throw around, $2,612.98 or more? That seems waaay more than is necessary.

~Grauw

p.s. I put 2GB of memory in the laptop about a month ago, to serve my Vista-and-WoW needs.

I have an HP dv6000, and it also had a larger (120G) disk than its obvious rivals. However, it's not a fast disk, or at least it certainly seems slower than the smaller (60G) disk in the VAIO that it replaced, and much slower than my desktop, which has a more-or-less similar processor and RAM spec.

The biggest issue that I have when buying laptops is that it's hard to know when extra money buys you real performance gains, or not. There may be something to be said to not buying the very latest, but only laptops that have been reviewed and benchmarked.

Cheers, Tony.

There is only one mouse button, true, but if you have two fingers on the trackpad when you click, you get your second mouse button.

Re: Parand, your problem with lag and delay -- how much RAM do you have? I bought an MBP with 1GB of RAM, and noticed some lag here and there, particularly with a number of apps open. Parallels was also nearly unusable. I added a second gigabyte of RAM, and magically everything works as I would expect, with no lag, including Parallels. OS X is known to be greedy for RAM.

I've got a Dell D620 and stuck in the MS world for work. At home, however, I've got an iMac w/Panther and love it! If I had a choice, I'd get a dual core MacBook Pro. That way I could multi-boot OS X, Windoze or linux as desired. I'd much prefer to have more options and rock-solid hardware.

Peter, I have 1G, I'll see if I can add one more.

I've noticed the problems seem to get much worse when I use Firefox. Using Camino keeps things more under control. But I strongly prefer FF - I need my extensions. Chatzilla, Firebug, QuickNote, etc.

By way of comparison - I bought a Vista laptop with 1G Ram 3 days after I got the MBP (a Toshiba A135-S4467). Despite having a less processor it's much snappier than the MBP.

I'm a Linux sysadmin at work, and have had various machines running various distros over the years. But when it came time to get a laptop, I got a 12" PowerBook. It's relatively small, but still reasonably powerful. It runs all the shiny commercial apps, plus lots of good free and open-source software. And in situations where people with Windows machine or Linux machines have had all sorts of problems or even failed completely (I'm thinking here especially of anything involving doing a presentation), the Mac just works.

It has a really nice X server, the terminals are good, and it's easy to set it up so that your SSH keys get loaded in for you the first time you need them, but also get dumped when your machine goes to sleep or you lock the screen. The networking stuff is really nice, too -- it's easy to set up different profiles for different locations, you can turn your Mac into an instant wireless access point if all you have is an Ethernet connection and a bunch of other laptops, and even if you leave it on auto, it usually just works.

The new machines are way faster, and, annoyingly from my perspective, bigger, but still very nice. When I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with another machine, it's nice being able to pull out my Mac and have it just work. I do think that the 17" one is insanely huge -- the 15" machine is pretty big, but can still be used on a plane or on your lap without going crazy. As the 15" model can support up to the 30" screen, I'd say adding an extra monitor for desktop work would be easier (and cheaper) than having the huge screen.

As for the single button trackpad -- it's not that big a deal. All you do is hold down the Control key, and you get used to it very quickly. To be fair, when I'm doing something where I really need to see what I'm doing or to spread out, I hook the machine up to a larger monitor and I usually also swap over my USB keyboard and trackball (and run the machine closed), but most of the time I don't miss the extra button at all. (I do think that using a single-button mouse is a real pain, but the current Apple mouse with multiple virtual buttons works quite well.)

I love Linux, but no way would I trade my Mac laptop for a Linux laptop.

Funny you would ask. I was in the same situation, and just ordered a MacBook Pro yesterday. No rational reason. After so many years of using PCs, I thought it was the time for something different.

Alex

Parand: I'm not quite sure what's the problem with your laptop. Not enough memory maybe? I know several Macbook users and I've never heard such a complain. I've switched to Apple about 3 years ago, before that I had Linux and Windows laptops. And as I said above, I'm not going back.

Here are the flaws that I have found using all these 3 OSs:

o Windows XP: dated UI, viruses, can't-get-rid-of-DOS file system, no native command line interface (Cygwin comes close, but there are still many "path" issues). In other words, it isn't Unix

o Linux (maybe outdated comments!): monolithic kernel (recompile or die), flaky wireless and bluetooth support, limited fonts, good-luck 3D drivers, suspend-and-but-not-always wake up mode, as many commercial applications as IBM's OS/2.

o Mac OS X: not-so-Unix-configation files, could-run-faster Java VM, bring lots of RAM.

In summary, I really like Linux too, but I can still run it using Parallels and it's worked fine for me so far. I haven't yet tried Vista, but I can't see myself switching to a non-Unix-based OS.