I've had a lot of luck with Sager. Previously alienware was a good fit, though you lost the 'cheaper than a mac' advantage most others give.

I don't get the battery life, and I imagine some tweaking would be required to do so.

I've not had a problem with trackpads on linux, after accounting for the 'set up synclient to run on startup so I don't accidentally scroll' that's been annoyingly necessary forever.

In the end, with Sager I get more memory + more max memory, faster CPU, larger SSD + secondary TB HDD for quite a bit less than a maxed out MBP. I haven't compared against the new specs yet, but I imagine it'll be consistent. My machine also typically outperforms mac-using coworkers for common dev tasks, but this is anecdotal and not measured.