System76 laptop

Oh, that looks lovely! I'll need to check them out. > Fully open source, the mouse (that I own) uses QMK for its firmware. Which means I can use key binding layers rather than single buttons. On this topic, I bought a System76 laptop this year, and I'm in love with its keyboard-configurator. The firmware for the keyboard is also fully open source, and the GUI configurator is really excellent. It's a little limited in WHAT you can bind (without going down the rabbit hole too far), but there are no limits at all on WHERE you can bind it, and it's beautiful. I made both left ctrl and fn work as ctrl (I could have made fn into hyper, too) and this is the first keyboard where I was able to do that (my previous laptop, Thinkpad, could only swap ctrl/fn functions). Open source firmware FTW! :)

I bought my S76 laptop via my work's "choose your own workstation" program. It's a great way to support continued development of the software I use PLUS when you buy via S76 you get lifetime support for the device. The support is not something I've made use of often, but it certainly paid off the one time I needed it. Basically, it depends on your idea of "value" - do you value money (buy cheaper hardware) or time (buy S76 with support)?

There's a lot of "it depends" in that, but I will say this. I'm a heavy user of Eclipse, and by and large I like it just fine, and it has run mostly OK on every computer I've used it on since about 2001 (or whenever it launched). But the one big annoyance I've always had with it was the startup time. And maybe a side order of "uses RAM aggressively enough that I don't usually want to run more than maybe two instances." Now I don't know if it's purely down to hardware, or if JVM improvements are also a big factor, but the last new computer I bought (a System76 laptop, that I got maybe not quite two years ago now) is powerful enough that Eclipse launches in a couple of seconds, and I can routinely have 7 or 8 instances running with no problem. The machine in question has all nvme and/or ssd drives, and has 64GB of RAM. yeah, I splurged a little bit when I bought it. And in hindsight, I couldn't be happier. You can never be too young, too good looking, or have too much RAM.

I recently purchased my first ubuntu-linux laptop from system76 ( http://www.system76.com/ ) --theyre a hardware company that ships exclusively ubuntu-linux laptops. I've been meaning to try them for a while now, but just had the chance to purchase one a few weeks ago. So far, I'm loving it. Among other things, here's what I enjoy presently: * They sell large screen models (17.3", here). * The hardware is completely linux-compatible. I installed ubuntu fresh (just to check hardware compatibility out of the box), and had 0 issues getting __all__ hardware components working (primary SSD drive, wifi, nVidia card, webcam, mic, etc.) * Their laptop has a really sturdy feel to it and looks very 'clean'. They use beautiful metalic casing which makes it look really high-quality. * They have one of those really sturdy 'programmer' type keyboards that I love to type on. Big win. * Their hardware upgrade option are, in my opinion, excellent. I purchased a 120G SSD primary drive, and 8G of RAM, and this thing is insanely fast. I'm talking 2 second boot time, insta-opening of even large applications (K3B, I'm looking at you), and quiet operation. Furthermore, their screens are absolutely beautiful. I'm not sure what distinguishes it from the $1,000 laptops you see around most stores, but the screen itself is top-notch. As a side note, I use a laptop as my primary computing device--programming / movies / etc., and only run linux. I enjoy high-resolution laptops (like the one I purchased fr