If anyone has some decent alternatives which I could load up Ubuntu on I'm all ears.
On a Desktop I would pick some flavor of Debian in an instance.
The average dev seems to be looking for a behemoth if a laptop but I’m at the other end. My daily until recently was a 12” MacBook and it’s been my favourite laptop so far
Would love something Linux-friendly in that form factor (incl build quality and weight)
At the end, in a whim, I tried a cheap Motile 142 from walmart ($329 at the time). 14in monitor seems to offset the aspect ratio quite well, the trackpad and keyboard are decent. Additionally, it is Amd 3500U, which seems well supported by the newer kernels. Upgrading with 16gb ram and NVMe ssd, also pushed the performance and usability of the machine.
At the end, I don’t think there is an universal answer to this. But with some experimentation, I’m pretty sure you can find a nice machine that works well for you.
PS: Motile laptop is also 2.55 lbs, which is a great weight for that size.
I do prefer Mac OS as a daily driver, but I would like to be able to do some light proof of concept ML training on a laptop with an nvidia card, and also sometimes some CAD (I've had terrible experience dual booting windows on this current mbp)
I'm currently trying google colab to see how much I can do with doing everything in the cloud
If you want a MBP, the ThinkPad x1 Carbon or T4xxs series (note the s, for the slimmer version) are still the best replacements IMHO.