The author is speaking authoritatively while coming from a very narrow, specific perspective, which seems pretty common on hacker news with Apple users who write about "my platform is better than yours" to the point of being disingenuous.

This type of thing pops up pretty often on HN from Apple users and it's almost always the same, I don't every see Linux users posting this sort of thing, different mentalities I guess.

Full disclosure, I didn't finish reading because it quickly devolved into fanboyish propaganda. It showed the typical fanboyism we should all be grown up enough to get over by now and not just "use my platform, it's better for everyone because it suits me better than yours does".

I (and my entire team; backend development) have been running Linux on our XPS 15's for the best part of a decade now. The Android development team at my place all run Linux too. The iOS Devs run on Apple devices, and the Windows Devs run on Windows, operations team all run Linux but they're using Latitudes (I think? The chunkier ones which still have ports and ethernet), management run a mix of Windows and Mac.

I have been exclusively running Linux on my personal XPS 13 for 2-3 years (since buying it), and on my MSI gaming laptop 5-6 years before then. I also run it on my gaming Desktop and have no major issues on any of those. I have been running 4K displays (which has gotten better in the past couple of years, particular with Gnome), and using Thunderbolt docks. My laptops and desktop sleep and wake just fine, CPU scaling works, I run a mixture of AMD Ryzen, and Intel Core CPUs and I've never had to touch a driver (Nvidia on work XPS is disabled at the moment). My desktop upgrades the Nvidia driver as part of its normal routine.

Let's be clear, the email apps aren't great on Linux, but I'm a backend software engineer, I don't care about email, it's just a thing I need to use occasionally to reply to my colleagues and sometimes our clients. I don't need HTML emails, in fact, it's almost always junk if it is HTML, calender I use but don't need anything advanced, just to know when meetings etc are.

Keyboard? My XPS 13 (2019) has much nicer keys than my work XPS 15 (2017) so they're improving for sure, however, I write code for a living, I have hundreds £££s worth of keyboards to type on, so the built in keyboard is a minor point. Use the tool for the job and all.

What I'm not blind to is that gaming would be easier/more reliable if I ran Windows, you won't catch me telling everyone to switch to gaming on Linux, I have my reasons for doing it, but it can be done if you really want to, you'll have to accept some compromises.

If you design/content create, Mac, I'm told is the best platform, you won't find me telling people to do that on Linux, but if you _really_ want, you can.

Guess what, if you write server software targeting Linux, use Linux, it has the best tools for the job.

The build quality of the XPSs is excellent. Unless I wanted to spend a lot more money on a specced thinkpad-carbon, I'd always buy an XPS over any other brand, they're super thin, very strong, great battery life, and DELL isn't hostile to you repairing them, you can buy a battery and change it yourself, the service manual is even on the website.