I did exactly this (well, "refreshed" vs. bought, as this is a company machine).

Could not be happier. Linux works great for what I do, I have a decent KB, no touchbar, no olympic sized trackpad that just gets in my way, actual PORTS I can use, *nix OS... totally happy.

Yes! Currently I'm in love with Elementary OS as my distro (I was a Mac user so the fancy UI is exactly what I wanted)

I quite like the butterfly keyboards. I find that, after I spent a few weeks getting used to it, I can type much faster and cleaner.

The removal of the escape key makes vim practically unusable, though. I know a few people who have remapped it to a different key, but still..

People should remap it anyways. The escape key is the farthest away key, yet it's the most frequently used key. I have it to `jj`.

I've been using Caps Lock as Esc for around a year now (and Shift + Shift for caps). It's a big ergonomic win for me on both my laptop and desktop keyboards.

ctrl + [