It's not a laptop, but I did buy my wife and kids a small system76 desktop. Good company, decent hardware. I would personally recommend doing a fresh Ubuntu i

It's not a laptop, but I did buy my wife and kids a small system76 desktop. Good company, decent hardware. I would personally recommend doing a fresh Ubuntu install as well. Mine froze up using their default install. On the other hand, once I did a fresh install everything worked beautifully. No hardware problems and no hunting for extra drivers(which I deplore having to do). What I like best about them is that they charge reasonable prices for upgrades. If you don't want a pure linux laptop, I concur with many of the other poster's here and recommend a Lenovo Thinkpad.(I have one and dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu.