I think Lenovo ThinkPad laptops have some of the best reputation in that regard, though the newer models can definitely be a bit on the pricey side.
Running boring plain vanilla Ubuntu LTS with the ("curse you, FreeDesktop.org!") Gnome Shell and a few extensions that probably drive the minimalists on the Gnome Project bonkers (also running a lot of web apps like Gmail and Keep as PWAs). Or at least I hope they do. Mostly program, don't game: I leave that to my kids, both game developers. As a literal greybeard I don't care much if The Year of the Linux Desktop ever comes, because I've been living The Life of the Linux Desktop for over two decades.
Still using docker for workloads at home, but if I was still managing massive numbers of containers at work I'd probably be running podman for anything that didn't justify the cost and complexity of k8s.
Even though it was sold as Linux supported device, it had its own series of issues, with wlan driver being broken when Canonical decided to replace it for a less capable one taking 6 months to reach feature parity, nowadays GL is stuck at 3.3, although fxgl used to be able to do 4.1.
And then there is the whole issue with VA-API, and the workarounds to watch hardware accelerated video.
Hence why when this netbook dies, I most likely will stick to using GNU/Linux from VMs, which I have been doing with VMWare since 2010 in other computers, I don't recall the last time I went through the trouble of setting a dual boot system.