One of the things that has kept me from trying Linux in earnest (and yes, I'm very lazy) is concerns about which hardware is supported by which flavors, and how much.
https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
You can option it up to 40GB of ram, it comes with a banging CPU and it weighs less than a macbook air. System76 makes sure that PopOS and Ubuntu both work flawlessly with their hardware.
I bought one the day it was released to replace my Carbon X1 (gen 6) and it has been perfect. In particular for me, USB-C charging + monitor works flawlessly when I disconnect and reconnect, and the power button is on the side, which is great because I use my laptop as a workstation most of the time.
Highly recommended if you want a linux machine.
Regarding the monitor, I find the 1920×1080 resolution fine at 14 inches. Super high resolution monitors this small ended up being annoying to me.
Regarding the keyboard, I prefer the Carbon X1, which has deeper keys and more key travel. The Lemur has keys similar to the macbook keyboard, very low profile and very short travel.
I've been waffling around thinking about getting an old refurb Macbook (not Pro, plain Macbook) just for carrying around town and to client locations, but this is obviously way, way better for not much more money.
Think of all the Kube clusters and Docker containers you could be running on it. The mind boggles!
But how well is that exactly? Don't answer that, it's a rhetorical question.
Will never be a new laptop distro - I'll bet you I can run Debian stable on my Thinkpad X200 without issue;)
Debian Stable is definitely not so hot on a year-old laptop, though a newer kernel from Backports can really help.
I have a 3-year-old HP laptop and have been running Debian Stable on it for about 6 months now. It's been a fairly seamless experience, as these things go.
For newer laptops, I definitely recommend Fedora. It's the easiest way to get new kernels -- which are what you need for new hardware -- on the regular.
Even though Lenovo provides some firmware via fwupd, this particular trackpoint firmware was only available via a Windows utility, which sucked since I wiped Windows off the machine as soon as I got it. (I had to make a Windows live USB for the sole purpose of installing this update.)
The trackpoint still occasionally dies after waking up from sleep (but much less often since I installed the firmware update.) When this happens I have to run a shell script I set up to bring the trackpoint back.
So, I can't say the Linux experience with my laptop has been great. I'm guessing the device support for these new laptops with Linux preinstalled will be much better.
I've been a full time Linux user since 2004, and can't remember having -any- hardware issues in the last five years. Prior to that, closer to 2004, I would have agreed. Finding and compiling alsa drivers, network drivers, graphics drivers, etc was a real pain in the ass. Not so today, AMD and Intel graphics are built into the kernel, even!