My compan has a couple hundred cheap AMD ryzen laptops with Fedora giving macbook pros a run for their money! I spend about 500$ on them (which includes a SSD). Its the world class desktop OS for the developing world!
I love developing on Linux too, and I really want it to be the best, but it's just not there yet.
> consistent touchpad gestures,
GNOME has this.
> rock-solid stability,
Yep.
> instant wake from suspend without draining battery consistently,
Has that even been a problem this decade?
> great GPU drivers
I defy you to claim that great GPU drivers exist on any operating system, but as long as you're not using Nvidia Linux is perfectly good.
Why someone would purchase such product is up to their decision. They surely should know, that they are getting into unsupported territory, where nobody did any integration. But it is their money they are throwing at Nvidia.
> Has that even been a problem this decade?
Actually, it was, when PC vendors decided they don't need ACPI S3 state, and Connected standby is enough. Connected standby requires support from OS, and when it was introduced, only Windows 10 supported it.
But not that Macs don't have their sleep issues either. It is a lottery, whether a Mac connected to a TB dock will wake up or not (it will after disconnecting the dock).
I've been looking for a viable contender and it appears that it just doesn't exist
The Ryzens are obviously in another league altogether here, but unless we get a Ryzen XPS, the Intel XPS are not bad.
but with the latest 5.0.7 kernels (F30 onwards).. they work great. maybe I lose a bit of battery life, but who cares.
It works great with linux though, very happy with that part.
There are two ACPI bugs (because of Acer bios issue), but the latest kernel (viz Fedora 30) has it working fine.