In the six months I've had my MacBook, I've downloaded and compiled somewhere around thirty Unix program distributions. Very few of them have given me any issues at all; when they have, it's been minor problems because their Mac porters decided to rely on Darwin Ports (a pre-ported set of Unix libraries that I have a strong distaste for), which is usually fixable with a few tweaks to a makefile or configure script. I can confidently say that anything you use in Ubuntu will still work under Darwin. This is true even of X programs, but you'd probably be much happier with a native Mac port of any GUI program (I eventually switched from XEmacs to GNU Emacs purely because the native port of the latter was far superior).
You can dual-boot Darwin and Vista if you get a MacBook and really need to, but I've never seriously been tempted to. Still, it comes down to your reasons for needing to dual-boot Ubuntu/Vista.
Neither Cat nor I have had any hardware problems after eight and six months of use, respectively; that's not a terribly significant sample, though. Rolf can probably give you a much better story about overall reliability and technical-service quality. At any rate, I'd say it's better than Dell, but only because I don't know a single Dell laptop user who hasn't had horrible problems at some point or another; of course, that's hearsay.
We do get inconsistent wireless reception on the exact same model of laptop, but in either case it's quite passable. We have mild reception problems at home, but I think that's our flaky router.
Performance is excellent. I've run WoW smoothly with iTunes, Emacs, and Eclipse all open in the background. Typing in Eclipse always feels sluggish to me, even running solitaire on Windows, so I can't really judge that; at any rate, it doesn't feel worse, and the non-typing aspects feel better.
If I put the screen on its dimmest (non-trivial) setting and turn off wireless, I can get a bit over two hours of battery life, which isn't great. Korell (my old Vaio) really could get up to 13 hours under similar constraints, but that's exceptional among laptops; it was fairly expensive to get, and I had to sacrifice a lot of power for that capability. Still, you shouldn't settle for anything less than two hours.
The word on the street is that IBM laptop quality has gone drastically down over the last several years.
Macs are generally about $200-$300 more expensive than comparable laptops from, say, Dell. Some of that is buying you a much better graphics subsystem — many of these low-end PC laptops don't even have specialized graphics memory, so it all comes out of core — but some of it is just the higher cost of owning a Mac.
no subject
You can dual-boot Darwin and Vista if you get a MacBook and really need to, but I've never seriously been tempted to. Still, it comes down to your reasons for needing to dual-boot Ubuntu/Vista.
Neither Cat nor I have had any hardware problems after eight and six months of use, respectively; that's not a terribly significant sample, though. Rolf can probably give you a much better story about overall reliability and technical-service quality. At any rate, I'd say it's better than Dell, but only because I don't know a single Dell laptop user who hasn't had horrible problems at some point or another; of course, that's hearsay.
We do get inconsistent wireless reception on the exact same model of laptop, but in either case it's quite passable. We have mild reception problems at home, but I think that's our flaky router.
Performance is excellent. I've run WoW smoothly with iTunes, Emacs, and Eclipse all open in the background. Typing in Eclipse always feels sluggish to me, even running solitaire on Windows, so I can't really judge that; at any rate, it doesn't feel worse, and the non-typing aspects feel better.
If I put the screen on its dimmest (non-trivial) setting and turn off wireless, I can get a bit over two hours of battery life, which isn't great. Korell (my old Vaio) really could get up to 13 hours under similar constraints, but that's exceptional among laptops; it was fairly expensive to get, and I had to sacrifice a lot of power for that capability. Still, you shouldn't settle for anything less than two hours.
The word on the street is that IBM laptop quality has gone drastically down over the last several years.
Macs are generally about $200-$300 more expensive than comparable laptops from, say, Dell. Some of that is buying you a much better graphics subsystem — many of these low-end PC laptops don't even have specialized graphics memory, so it all comes out of core — but some of it is just the higher cost of owning a Mac.
I hope this helps.