I’m giving the Asus Proart P16 a try, if I was trying for maximum battery life I’d probably avoid the discrete gpu (e.g. a zenbook or similar). I am not a full time road warrior so battery life is important, but not absolutely critical. There may be some options out with better battery life, but I haven’t been focused on this metric too closely.

I just don’t want to be sidetracked by overly aggressive and pushy decisions by my OS vendor anymore. I’ve been happy with the stability of my Debian/Ubuntu systems for getting work done. I have been using apple laptops for 10+ years, and I still like their build quality, but I don’t like the direction macOS (or Windows) is heading.

Probably not quite, though recent laptops improved. But on a desktop setup it doesn’t matter anyway.