I'm running a Lenovo L520, i7, 16GiB RAM, SSD and it flies along. Linux Mint (& Ubuntu) work out of the box, and it has a fantastic keyboard and matte screen.

I'm running a Lenovo L520, i7, 16GiB RAM, SSD and it flies along. Linux Mint (& Ubuntu) work out of the box, and it has a fantastic keyboard and matte screen. My only gripe is that there's no USB 3.