I want; I mean I really want, an Apple MacBook Air. Mind you, I wouldn’t kick a Lenovo ThinkPad X300 or Toshiba Portege R500 out of my hotel bedroom either. If you’re a Mac or Windows user you’ve got several excellent top-of-the-line ultra-thin laptop choices. If you’re a desktop Linux user, your choices aren’t that great. So far.

Oh, there are excellent pre-installed Linux laptops. For a full-powered one I see it as almost being a coin-toss between the Lenovo R61 with SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 2 and the Dell 1420N. The quick and dirty on how to choose between them is that the Lenovo works extremely well with office network environments, especially those that use AD (Active Directory), while the Dell with commercial DVD-playback built-in is a better home user buy. One last thought on solid working Linux laptops: Dell will be moving to Ubuntu 8.04 any time now, so you may want wait a tick before buying one. Good machines and I paid my own money to get an R61, but these are not ultra-thin sexy laptops.

More >