!rant
So I went through this exercise maybe a year and a half ago and didn't get anywhere. But I'm sure with the help of fellow ranters I might get somewhere :D

What Macbook alternative laptops would you recommend? Criteria would include: Screen with similar resolution (2880x1800) and quality, built-in SSD, 15", 8GB Ram, i7 and hopefully not a multi colored body or keyboard... If it came with Linux you win.

... should actually rather be 16 GB for comparison. Also 256 SSD

My dev machine which is a quad core A8, 8gb (upgradeable to 16gb) 1tb hdd was around 379$

1TB SSD?

@ardinent HDD

Dell xps 15

@philcr The one that matches the criteria is around $1900 right?

Just watched a review on the XPS 15 and the issue of windows scaling and text sharpness at 200% came up. Then checked Linux's support for 4K scaled and didn't really get too much info.

Any opinions?

@ardinent I have the XPS 13 and scaling in Ubuntu Gnome seems fine. Even in Windows there are very few issues, it all seems a little overblown to me.

In general the specs of macbooks are over rated. The one great thing on it is the trackpad. Find something with a decent trackpad and you are set.

@rusty-hacker Trackpad, build quality and keyboard is on the MBP is great. One of my biggest things is the text sharpness and quality on the MBP screen. Specifically on the text! Don't care too much about photos/movies and needless to say... games.

Have unfortunately not seen the same quality on any other's... with that said I don't see many others. I work from home as a freelancer. Just can't justify spending most of my day on a screen that I know isn't as much of a pleasure to work on as the MBP one. Definitely going to go have a look at the screen of the XPS at the computer shop. Most probably they won't have the 4K in stock though. Bah!

I think you can buy the XPS 13 preloaded with Ubuntu, not sure if you still can tho