The rest of the Blade lineup is in dire need of a refresh, as you say. The bezels are ridiculous when compared to some of the recent high performance offerings from Dell, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.
As for linux, this is an intensely personal decision, but with W10 + the Windows Subsystem for Linux, its actually pretty darn usable. Its not like Cygwin or a virtual machine; its literally a bash app that almost emulates a linux distro of your choice, and works identically to if you're in that linux distro. These videos explain it pretty well [1] [2].
Of course, you're still working in Windows, so if the UI is the reason why you don't want to use Windows then you'll have to virtualize or dual-boot or whatever. But, in a lot of ways, this is more of an advantage than a con: it gives you access to all of the software that isn't available on Linux, like Office, Adobe, games, etc.
1. Enormous screen bezel, which made it silly to lug around a laptop with the screen real estate of one much smaller.
2. Without careful, tedious manual power management in linux the cooling fans routinely spin up to dust buster sound levels under normal use, which is unacceptable if you exist around other human beings.
The Surface Book 2 is an interesting option, but the linux support, while improving through community effort, is still spotty [1]. At the moment it has many power draw, heat, and noise issues. Also, everyone I know who has had a surface device has had to have it serviced or RMA'd at least once, which is not acceptable for something so expensive from such a large vendor.
[1] https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface