Depends what you need ofcourse; a lot of people buy the newest and fastest but do not need it. Most (90%+) of my dev work works fine on an X220 which I can pick up for $80, has stellar linux support and still really good (14+ hour) battery life. Depends on the use case ofcourse, but when I see what most people around me do on their 2k+ laptops, they could have saved most of that. Also, Ubuntu Unity is just not very good; but Ubuntu or Debian with i3 are perfect. Cannot imagine a better desktop.