[gentoo-user] OT: advice sought on new laptop for Gentoo

[John Blinka <john.blinka@gmail.com>]

Hi, all,

My trusty Inspiron 8200 is on death's door and so I'm looking for a
new laptop - one that will run Gentoo straightforwardly, of course.

I really liked the 1600x1200 display on this machine, which I greatly
prefer to the 1600x900 display on the more modern Inspiron 1545 I own.
 Most of what I do now is through a web browser, and I can see much
more of a web page with 1200 lines of display than I can with 900.
And I dislike the massive width of the 1545 which makes it much less
portable than the old 8200.  I'd love to replace my 8200 with a
machine of similar dimensions, but thinner and lighter.  However, I
cannot find any machine on Dell's website with a 4x3 aspect ratio -
they all seem to be approximately 16x9 now.

So,  is 16x9 all that's available now in laptops?

If I'm stuck with a 16x9 aspect ratio, then I'd like to get something
significantly narrower and more portable than my 1545 (14.75", 37.5 cm
wide) and with as many horizontal lines in the display as possible.

Any suggestions?

(And, yes, I'm open to a non-Dell solution.)

Thanks for your suggestions,

John Blinka