What's the best laptop for running any Ubuntu flavored desktop?
Thinkpads (the actual ones, not the cheap Ideapad-in-a-black-case-things). Of course, you don’t really save money compared to a Macbook, but the hardware appears (to me) much sturdier.
The only thing that didn't work instantly and perfectly on my Lenovo X220 the last time I built it (2 years ago) was the fingerprint reader, but as I use Yubikey I was OK with this (plus I found an online guide to getting it working that seemed pretty comprehensive and people were raving about).
That said, I think Apple has done a pretty good job of being respectful of privacy. You are asked explicitly whether to share information (location services etc) and you can always say no. Compare this to the latest Ubuntu release where your local file searches are being sent to Amazon as a default feature.
I generally run an ubuntu vm on osx, because i love the linux command line ecosystem, but as time goes on I find myself needing to customise more and more just to get a sane base configuration.
I really don't understand why ubuntu doesn't focus on their niche - giving developers a nice dev environment and then slowly working to stabilise apis and turn it into a platform. Then they can think about other stuff. At the moment they are trying to compete with companies that are much larger, with much more budget.
I still use CentOS to this day (Asterisk), it's painful.