I ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years, running many years with all the big ones, from Slackware to RedHat to SuSE to Gentoo to Ubuntu. Except for gaming, it was my main OS at work and home for about 15 of those years. I even worked 4 years at a place that used Gentoo for all the mission critical stuff, for a person who was a prolific contributor.<p>I finally switched to a MBPr about 3 years ago, and have never been happier. Except that the hardware prospects seem dim. So I've been contemplating moving back. The problem is that the great battery life, flawless suspend and resume, and reliable external display handling of the MBP have forever spoiled me.<p>For a couple years, I used Gentoo on a Dell laptop, and it was very touchy about how I shutdown and suspended, lest it get stuck, and need to have the battery removed to reset it. At one point, in dealing with Xconfig, I even fried the video card (which Dell covered under warranty). When I read stories, like this one, about people running Linux on a laptop, I'm very careful to note the points they make about these things, but nothing I've read makes me think that any available Linux install is going to do well handling these things out of the box, and I'm just tired of tweaking kernel settings and config files to make them work.<p>If someone could say that some particular laptop works perfectly with some particular distro of Linux, I'd probably give it another go. I really hold out hope for Dell's XPS Linux machine, but I read that it has the font display issues, and so on.<p>I have a strong suspicion that, at 47 years old, I will put up with whatever hardware Apple gives me to not have to mess with such things again.