What laptop should I buy?

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(10-26-2018 12:01 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  the TravelMate series

It's funny that you mention those, because I've had a pretty bad time with one. It was a TravelMate B115, manufactured in September 2014, which I got in mid-2015. I put up with it for just over two years, then I abandoned it for the laptop I'm typing this on (Dell XPS 13), which almost instantly felt much more pleasant. (Well, I had to tinker with the libinput code to get the experience I wanted, but that's something I blame my distro for; the installation on the TravelMate B115 received the old Synaptics driver, but in late 2017 the default input driver was libinput.)
During those two years I got countless instances of missed or duplicate keystrokes (like two dozen for a text as long as this post) due to the distance between the point where a key feels like it's pressed and the point where it actually registers. The XPS 13 isn't perfect either, but I've yet to experience a missed or duplicate keystroke when I'm not actively trying to provoke it (by pushing down a key in ultra-slow motion).
The touchpad kept imagining a finger that jumped everywhere and clicked on things (everytime it happened, I quickly put a real finger on it to limit the damage to unwanted scroll movements instead of rapid cursor movement and clicking, then pushed Fn-F7 twice with the other hand to turn the touchpad off and on again). It was so bad that it got me into the habit of ALWAYS carrying an actual mouse everywhere, even when my bag was already overflowing, just for the ability to operate the laptop with the touchpad turned off. And it wasn't a false negative from the touchpad driver's palm rejection (as one might suspect initially), because on several occasions it happened when I had opened a text file or web page, wiped the touchpad with a piece of cloth, then leaned back to read the file or page while my hands were far away from the touchpad. Luckily this malfunction didn't cause data loss (Ctrl-Z to undo saved me more than a few times when it selected text while I was typing), but it managed to close some slow-starting programs on several occasions.
The laptop's shell cracked near the hinges a few months before I abandoned it. While it didn't fall apart entirely yet, this made the hinges very wobbly, and I had to press upper and lower halves together to line up a hole in the upper half with the socket mounted on a board resting on the lower half in order to insert the charging cable.
The TravelMate B115 can apparently come with several different wireless networking chips, and there's no indication from outside which one you get in a given laptop. My father's had an Intel chip, my identical-looking one got Broadcom, and another family member got yet another option (can't remember which). On Linux, the Broadcom driver has to be installed separately, and it depends on ndiswrapper (meaning it's a blob of the Windows driver, i.e. closed-source, which leaves some open-source-only distros out in the cold). Not what you expect from a device advertised as Linux-friendly - I took one without a Windows license for a reason.
The only things about this laptop I'm missing with my current one are a third USB port (shame on you, Dell - but many other manufacturers are doing the same in their current ultrabooks) and that it was passively cooled. With the spinning HDD it came with swapped for a SSD it became completely silent. To be fair, my new laptop has a bit more processing power too, so the presence of a fan is reasonable.

After a laptop that forced me to constantly monitor it for misbehavior (wonky keyboard, phantom finger on the touchpad), used hardware which is poorly supported on one of the operating systems it's built and sold for, and started falling apart after less than two years of use, that's going to be the first and last Acer laptop in my possession.