Among friends the most popular options look to be Dell XPS 13 and on sale it can get close to that price point, and the Thinkpad T4xx models, which are good che

Among friends the most popular options look to be Dell XPS 13 and on sale it can get close to that price point, and the Thinkpad T4xx models, which are good cheaper options refurbished. System76 makes nice gear and I've heard good things about the Galaga Pro, but hardly any of their models are currently available. I've been looking into this too. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on an older MacBook Pro and apart from the occasional kernel update sending CPU use through the roof, the experience has been good. But it looks like a less appealing option on the newer models with the touchbar sadly. I wish Apple would include regular hardware function keys as well as the touchbar. It would make the touchbar 10x more useful on macos also.