I bought the 15" Serval Pro (sp7). It weighs about the same as my 17" MBP did. So, same weight, but smaller screen. Naturally it's thicker. I went with the

I bought the 15" Serval Pro (sp7). It weighs about the same as my 17" MBP did. So, same weight, but smaller screen. Naturally it's thicker. I went with the 15" because at the time of purchase that was the only one with a matte display option. I had the hi-res matte 17" MBP. No doubt about it, that screen was nicer. But, I really don't have any complaints about my new 15" screen. I've been using it actively for about 2 months now and have gotten used to it. The other two areas the MBP clearly win out are battery life and power supply. I couldn't really use my MBP without a Kinesis, so long battery didn't mean much. But the System76 gets about 2.5 hours like most other brands. The power supply is a beast though and adds another 4 lbs or so when traveling. It also lacks the awesome mag-safe connector. Bonuses: comfortable keyboard, nice rubber finish, no sharp edges, integrated keypad, plenty of ports and no need for dongles, replaceable battery, easy hardware upgrades, up to 32 GB RAM (I went with 16 GB), and well-supported hardware. The trackpad is nice. It took some getting used to since I had used a clickpad for so long. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. I dual-boot Win 7 for dev work and set it up such that I can access that partition as a raw disk in VMWare. While it works pretty well out of the box, it's a Linux laptop so I would expect to do some tinkering. And while it's a pretty attractive system, it has nowhere near the sex appeal of a MBP or MBA. That matters little to me. I treat it as a portable workstation and really just want to get work done. But, just be aware of what you're buying.