I have a System76 fully loaded little NUC. It is a beast, extremely quiet, and was a lot cheaper than a Mac. System76 customer support is really really good. You send an email and you get a response back from a developer pretty quick. I've been pretty satisfied so far. They don't make their own hardware, but they make sure a customized Ubuntu distro (Debian and Fedora are also supported) is silky smooth on all their systems. You pay a little extra, but the process was so painless and still a lot cheaper than Apple, so I'm happy.