1. It has to run Linux (preferably Ubuntu, as I'm most familiar with this) well, like really well as it'll be my main OS.
2. Small (13" would be the largest)
3. Perhaps with NVIDIA GPU so I can run CUDA stuffs (as I've been into machine learning stuffs these days) on it and so some casual gaming.
Through focusing on criteria (1) and (2), I came across Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, which is a laptop with native Ubuntu OS. Because it didn't come with Windows, guess what? It actually costed cheaper than the non-developer options that came with Windows! And the best part is that Ubuntu is optimized to run well on the laptop. Tempting. Very tempting. As finding a decent laptop to run Ubuntu had indeed been challenging, I drooled over the one with 256GB SSD and i7 CPU. But still I didn't buy it.
Thankfully, it didn't have an NVIDIA GPU! If only it had it, I'd have already bought it. So what's the deal? Well, I realized that my combo of X201 with Ubuntu had been serving me really well. There had almost been no time I needed more performance than what it offered (except, of course, for casual-gaming purposes, which I rarely do and I already have dedicated gaming devices anyway) So I thought: if it only had Intel's integrated GPU, how would it serve me better than my X201? Not much, really. Moreover, I already had a docking station for my X201! If I were to buy a new laptop, for sure I'd want to get a dock for it, and that'd be like $100+ extra. Bummer..
Long story short, instead of having abandoning it, I decided to give my Thinkpad X201 some love. I treated it with a 500GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO. How did it go? Really sweet! With Ubuntu 14.04 (w/o any form of disk encryption enabled), it booted in 12 seconds! Going to/resuming from hibernate was almost instantaneous! So far I've been loving it so much :)
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