System 76 is good if you want to pay extra for the convience of having all the drivers ready to install. The machines work out of box, end of story. Thy are solid, fair battery life, and not an eyesore. However you pay more then an equivilent laptop with windows, and they aren't amazing from a design standpoint either. The service is good, your calls are answered in an office, not a call center in India. If you opt to go with some other brand, use nvidia for graphics, as the support for drivers is much better. Asus makes good machines, and I find ubuntu runs on them almost out of the box as well. MacBook pros are solid machines. If you are big on design, they look and feel great. However in my opinion it's not worth the extra $700. I have never tried programming on a mac, but the feeling I get from friends, and reading the comments is that anything besides web design/development and you will start to run into problems.