Um... possibly? I know artists that swear by the iPad pencil. In theory you could keep using that and then run Linux on your main computer. But in practice, I don't actually know if Linux support for iPad management is up to snuff.

I'm sure there's some kind of experimental driver support at least, but it has to actually be good.

You're probably not wrong. If you're looking at a new Macbook maybe there's at least good odds you already don't care about touch? In which case, it's not a bad idea to at least think about Linux, especially since you're already familiar with more than a few of the command line conventions.