I have been using ASUS Zenbook UX301L + Ubuntu for 3 years now, and I'm pretty happy with it. Having said that, I think the system requirements of a 2018 devel

I have been using ASUS Zenbook UX301L + Ubuntu for 3 years now, and I'm pretty happy with it. Having said that, I think the system requirements of a 2018 developer are quite different than a 2012 developer. Today you can accomplish vast majority of development tasks on a remote instance on the cloud. I haven't compiled or ran a program locally for ages (except for a browser/terminal/spotify/etc). I have a cheap EC2 instance that I use for coding and those sorts of things, when I need to run some more data intensive jobs (e.g. compilation, data crunching, etc) I just launch some more robust instances to take care of that for me. Therefore, in my opinion, a proper setup of a cloud environment that autoscales with respect to your needs is much more cost effective than a powerful laptop.