I will buy myself a new notebook in around 2 1/2 months and I would like to know your opinions.
I do web development and Android app development. I will most likely put arch linux on it. It will be my main workstation and I would also like to us it for university to which I will go in 3 years.
My current favorite is the Dell XPS 15.
Do you have any other suggestions or is the Dell good?

I was about to say dell xps 15... It looks perfect for arch as well

For me personally XPS 13 is a little bit more compact but it's only a preference.
Other good machines are of course ThinkPads.
If you have nerves of steel hell you could even put arch on a MacBook

@dontPanic Not so sure about that, recent Macs seem to pose a lot of problems on Linux, last I checked even the keyboard was poorly supported. Plus, fuck Apple sideways with their most recent choices (I can't get past how much of a turd the new AppleTV remote is, how could a company so proud of its UX even consider putting this on market)

I've been waiting for the Asus UX550 ever since they announced it (basically an XPS15, but with 1050Ti available, and two 4 lanes thunderbolt 3 instead of the XPS's single fake thunderbolt 3, which only has 2 lanes and therefore only thunderbolt 2 performance), but they announced it in June and nothing was heard from it ever again. Hopefully in 2 months itall be out.

I like Lenovo's keyboard, but I want an ultrabook with a 7700HQ (considering with T3 I could get an eGPU if the need arises, so graphics card isn't too relevant to me), and it seems they haven't decided to put it in a relatively light notebook yet.

@CptFox from my experience I can say that the compatibility with macbooks is awful but it's definitely doable to make a dual boot and in a finite time have it figured out. I once posted a rant about my arch Linux dual boot setup on a MacBook air. Another thing is, there is no viable software to make use of a touchbar on Linux. So yeah

@dontPanic I have been using an iMac for the past 6 years but I don't want to buy a MacBook because of the price (if I plan to install linux)

@404response seems fair

The Asus you mentioned looked juicy as fuck to me due to the Ti, but if I recall correctly the chassis I'm not on par with the build quality and sturdiness of the XPS. The Asus tends to flex a bit too much for my taste whereas the XPS has zero flex to me.

I am an owner of the XPS so I'm gonna give you some of my thoughts. The 1050 non-ti is better than I thought, I game a lot on the thing and if you can bother to lower details on the most demanding games you can enjoy some good 900p/1080p gaming on anything and while it might get warm on the hands internal temperatures are actually pretty good. The 4k screen is a s t o n i s h i n g but somewhat a gimmick, the touchpad is incredibly good (almost pre-forcetouch macs level) and the keyboard is good but nothing special. I like how the inside is easily accessible for ram/SSD upgrade or cleaning/repasting. The biggest flaw is the tb3 with 2 PCI lanes but the performance drop is noticeable only if [continue below]

Only if you use an eGPU with the laptop screen (2 lanes bottleneck situation where you have big data flows in both directions simultaneously). If you outsource the video to another screen and thus using a different cable from the eGPU enclosure itself it has pretty much the same performance of a TB3 4 lanes. If I remember correctly it is also limiting the number of external displays attachable through the usb c or their refresh rates, but using at most 2 external displays I never had any trouble.

I also wish there was some better antireflective coating on the 4k glass panel but this is a minor issue to me.

Linux support is pretty good. I have not tried arch, but I've been able to dual boot kinda easily Ubuntu, Debian and fedora. I had some problems with elementary OS where if I installed only that the grub through elementary refused to gain precedence over windows boot manager.

If you have any particular questions you can ask, i'll try to answer. Sorry for the wall of text.

@Snatchedd np, thank you for all the information. If any questions come to my mind I will ask you

@404response Glad to help :)

@Snatchedd thanks for the review, that might have pushed me a few months ago. Actually I might double check on a promo I saw for a pro version (precision I think), which had a quadro GPU and a 7820HQ. That XPS is getting pretty old though, so I think I'll wait for the next version of for Razer's new blade (hopefully they finally trim those bezels a bit, and make the 4k available in France), I can't shake the feeling that I still want something a bit beefier than a 1050.

I heard the SSDs delivered were pretty inconsistent. How's your XPS's read/write speed ?

@CptFox i got the Toshiba one which is in the 1500s/1000s (if I remember correctly. I don't have my machine with me rn) of r/w and is kinda of the "middle tier". Best possible you can get is a samsung which is blazing fast but the others are not "bad". The 1TB one is only Samsung tho. The inconsistency is in the smaller capacities due to different manufactures used for stock.

I really wanted a blade, but the bezels and unavailability in Italy (they are still selling the 970m model here) broke the deal. I don't want to drop 2/3k on a machine and have the hassle of sending it back to the US for warranty. If only razer would get they so much claimed worldwide availability for they were boasting 2 years ago...

@Snatchedd Agreed. In France it's a bit better, we have the latest blade. Just that the 4k version is unavailable. I also kind of hate the idea of buying a 2-3k€ laptop without ever seeing one for myself. That's one of the reasons I'm so eager for the Asus, since Asus shows its products much more

@CptFox @Snatchedd so all in all do you guys think that the Dell XPS 13/15 is good and worth it or are there better alternatives?

@404response For now, it's pretty much the best balanced laptop available. More performance oriented, the Gigabyte Aero 15 and Razer Blade are both still light, but I dislike the show placement of the aero, and would like the blade to be 15"

But any of these 3 are very good computers, so if you can't wait, go for any of these, or a Lenovo that suits your power needs (their keyboards are awesome). If you want to wait, Asus should push out the ux550 at some point, and razer might update the blade for Christmas

I agree with @CptFox, I still feel that the XPS is the most well rounded (solid performance, decent mid-tier gpu, awesome battery life for the hardware etc) and might be beaten at that by the new asus. Still there are plentiful of good laptops out there. Besides the ones mentioned, if you don't need a dGPU you can also look at LG's gram series or the new Notebook 9 from Samsung. Also the HP spectre lineup is often underlooked but I think it is a beautiful machine (provided you do not care much for the GPU since it is crap).

One thing I'd like to point out: last time I tried to compile an Android app w/ Android Studio on my 8G ram laptop, the performance got killed by swapping even with an SSD. 8G ram should be considered minimum requirement for full fledged (lots of dependencies, running emulator, open browser viewing docs & YouTube, etc.) Android development.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Android developer. Better search the web to do your own research.

@goofgoof Agreed, dev tends to take a lot of RAM. In reverse engineering, some of my tools would even crash when limited to 4GB, unless I closed all other processes, or slow to a crawl due to garbage collection (Java tools). Now my minimal amount of RAM is 16GB, to be on the safe side

my choice was http://dell.com/de/p/...