So you don't say what you consider best. Do you need a discrete GPU and a huge screen? Do you want a lightweight ultraportable with great battery life? Also

So you don't say what you consider best. Do you need a discrete GPU and a huge screen? Do you want a lightweight ultraportable with great battery life? Also after christmas sales are often good for tech, if you can wait. You can often get refurbs from returns for great prices. I'm on a thinkpad T530. added an aftermarket SSD and 16 gb of ram (You need a W system to get 32GB, but it's possible). Note, get an intel wifi card that supports 2.5 and 5.0 channels. a T540 is a substantially better machine, both with haswell getting better power managment, and the ability to hotswap batteries because of a smaller internal battery. I also have an hp chromebook 14 running crouton lubuntu 14.04 I got for $236 on woot. It's fine as a secondary laptop, and seems to have good battery life. I do occasionally miss having a meta key. I run xfce, not unity, and I'd recommend a light-weight DE. It is notably slower compiling (things like YouCompleteMe's C++ code for vim). The other thing to consider is a cheap foreign made computer, like Sager or Clevo. They are bare bones systems, but that's often better for linux support. I'd also look at resources from reddit's r/SuggestALaptop like http://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/comments/2448oy/guide_1400_are_you_looking_for_a_programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/comments/2448oy/guide...