I really like someone stepping up and making a high quality linux laptop. After the thread yesterday about System76 (who I thought was doing that) this makes me really happy. It's also somewhat a threat to Apple. If you aren't doing any iOS development you will now get a really nice alternative to a Macbook Pro.
Really not impressed with my XPS 13. The screen automatically changes brightness depending what is shown on it (dynamic brightness). The touchpad works really poorly, detects palm touches as clicks all the time. Nearly impossible for me to type without clicks. Messing with settings reduced palm clicks but made the pad unresponsive to clicks from my finger.
Had lockups until I upgraded kernel and flashed now BIOS. Audio had really loud hissing until I opened alsamixer and set controls to exactly the right values (got of a wiki page). To be fair, the audio is noisy on Windows 10 too.
My old Lenovo X200 works nearly flawless on Linux. Again, pretty disappointed with Dell.
I haven't tried an XPS, but the Precision 7xxx stuff definitely qualifies. My 7510 came with Ubuntu, and the experience was just as polished as any Windows machine (better in some ways, as they had configured their way around some Skylake-specific issues that still affected Windows at the time).
They are but all my experiences with Dell have been really subpar so I am almost permanently turned off from them. The XPS Developer Edition does look interesting though. But I am biased towards Razer because I am a gamer and would love to have a laptop that is great at development and great at playing games.
Since Lenovo's three spyware scandals, I'm never touching one again. I love my t410, but it's showing its age (or, has been for years) and as much as I wanted to go with Lenovo for a new machine, I can't bring myself to buy something that's MITMing my TLS connections or has firmware that persists spyware. These issues may be fixed in the newer models, but the company has lost all trust in my eyes.
Dell is much closer to this than Razer. Razer hasn't stepped up yet. To quote Tyler Durden, "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."
It's a high quality linux-ish environment and has a huge ecosystem of developer tools. You can get almost anything that runs on linux on your MBP and you can also get a ton of things you can't get on linux that come from Apple or from enterprise companies.
It's also probably the number 1 dev environment for a ton of use cases so you get support and network efforts in the ecosystem. Are you a fullstack dev? Then OSX is for you. You have all your IDE, servers, Chrome, etc up and running very quickly.
If by 'almost anything' you mean 'some, mostly using node.js or ruby', then yes. Otherwise, no. For example, Docker has to run a Linux VM underneath to just work.
Both linux and macos have different strengths and weaknesses, and one is not a fully capable replacement of another, not even just for the cli/daemon stuff.
I'm writing this on a rMBP - and there are still reasons to ssh into a centos box.
Docker is an extreme example. Of course things relying on Linux-only kernel features are unlikely to run natively. You'll find plenty of compiled stuff on OSX (wkhtmltopdf, freeciv, postgres, inkscape, clojure, etc., etc.).
I know, I run postgis+mapnik on OSX. It is quite PITA to build, postgres clients usually link against wrong (system-supplied & ancient) libpq[1], everything links against wrong (system-supplied & ancient) zlib, half the things link against wrong (system-supplied & ancient; see the pattern?) sqlite, etc. Yes, it is problem with the build scripts, but I don't have an ambition to fix all the packages, and Linux packages do not have this problem. Actually, they have usable and maintained binaries just a single yum command away, so you are up and running in no time, compared to solving build env problems in OSX.
[1] - /usr/lib/libpq.dylib is especially annoying offender. Most dylibs are at least fat ones, but this one is x86_64 only. That means, when you want to build a fat binary of some libpq client, and it is being linked against system one, the build will fail. That includes building i386/fat version of postgresql itself.
