Acer. I've got a 3.5 year old Travelmate that was only $1600 when I bought it (probably a lot less now). The headphone jack just gave out (and it's still good for mono, I just lost stereo) and I've had no other problems with it. By contrast, the Sony Vaio I had before that had lost its headphone jack, Ethernet jack, and CD-R by the time it reached 18 months. There are occasional duds (the first unit I got was DOA), but I bought it on my former boss's recommendation and he's owned a string of Acers with very good reliability.

It also ran Linux fine except for the wireless, and that was because the Pentium-M chipset was too new at the time to have full-featured Linux drivers. I'd imagine that that problem was corrected long ago. And I like how Acer doesn't load you down with bundleware - my laptop came with just enough software to use all the hardware features, and none of these applications that I didn't want.