Just ordered the same thing! Really excited. Aluminum case! this will be my 3rd System76 laptop and like 8th System76 computer in general.
Hopefully battery life is decent, the specs are pretty insane.
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Awesome! Itās my second System76 laptop, previous was a Galago UltraPro. Very much looking forward to the upgrade, but I havenāt heard great things about the battery. Pop OS 18.x is suppose to include better battery profile stuff, so I hope that helps.
I have a bunch of Lenovo Laptops of the last 18 years, some stock models, some customized with coreboot, libreboot, more RAM, etc. It usually depends on what your requirements are. If I canāt find a suitable system for building software (mainly I develop Operating Systems), thereās another system I can offload the build to. I had good experiences with the T and X models.
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I discovered cpufreq to reduce processor power when you want to save battery life. I hear good things but havenāt really put it through the paces yet.
Would love tools for undervolting on Linux, better thermals and more battery 
Iāve heard @mobileoverlord loves his XPS. Iām looking at upgrading to either the Dell XPS 13 or a Razer model.
cpufreq seems to do a solid job. It lets you control how many cores are active, so I can convert my laptop from 8 to 2 if I want to save power. Iāve seen a pretty noticeable improvement from it with my small test window.
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I prefer to have as much as possible in BIOS, so I donāt have to depend on OS.
For example I have nuc box, and it is perfect fine for linux, also I can setup most everything in BIOS.
The pretty good comprise are 28W/35W TDP processors.
Easy to cool, not so hot and good performance.
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I do too, but bios settings is usually pretty limited on laptops 
- atleast on my Asus UX550VE.
Balancing price, processing power and battery life would be the new āGemini-Lakeā Celeron N4100 or Pentium Silver N5000 both are quad-core and 6 watts TDP. You can get a Lenovo Ideapad 330 Notebook w/N4100 for only $250 (review#1) (review#2) and install more RAM and a good SSD drive. This is better than a Chromebook I think, for a programmer who doesnāt mind a non 1080P screen. For nearly twice the price you could go with the Core i3-8130U CPU of course would be a big speed improvement - note: I would stick with the integrated Intel 600/620 graphics for perhaps better Linux driver support (arguable?).
The most common problem Iāve seen with running Linux on low cost Apollo-Lake (N3450) and Gemini-Lake (N4100, N4200) notebooks is with some of them the touchpad does not work. So that would be something to test outā¦ with booting up a distro via Live-USB.
[EDIT] This guy says the latest version of Ubuntu (18.04) works fine on the Lenovo Ideapad 330 and he also resolved his touchpad problem. Lenovo seems to have a decent Support/discussion forum as well.
āBought a ideapad 330 15igm 81d1. loaded Unbuntu 18.04, and everything works great except for the elantech touchpad.ā
Here is the referenced Ubuntu thread where it was fixed:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1049787/lenovo-ideapad-330-touchpad-not-working/
[EDIT#2] As of June 2018, here is an Ideapad 330 w/Core-i3 owner running Manjaro. Again, everything works fine except the touchpad which he fixed by rebuilding the kernel. This will undoubtedly be fixed soon in a new kernel release.
_ Personal note: Iāve been using a Lenovo Ideapad G50 w/AMD A6 quad-core for years running various flavors of Linux. Currently running rolling release Arch based Manjaro XFCE. Like it a lot. The only problem I ever had with it was a flaky/intermittent wifi (Realtek RTL8723bs) but that was eventually fixed later in the Kernel. I think I paid $320 for it years ago. Parts are cheap and easy to find. I spilled coffee on the keyboard and surprised it still runs fine after replacing it. Just the SD card reader stopped working._
If ever touchpad issues then I wonder how running Kubuntu would work, KDE uses a lot of itās own interfaces for touchpads and more to work better so I wonder if that would workā¦
I pointed out on the Manjaro forum how this could probably be patched by merely changing one (or a few) bytes in the driver binary using a binary/hex editor. It seems easier than rebuilding the whole kernel for such a simple change. That would work around the problem until they include the fix in a forthcoming kernel. And this could be done for other notebooks with the same problem.
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At the other end of the cost spectrum prob the best would be a Dell XPS 13 or XPS 15 or the Lenovo X1 Carbon 14 or 15 inch with 8th generation Intel Core i5 or i7ā¦These will set you back well over US$1000
I read a lot of complaints about Lenovo X1ās compatibility with GNU/Linux, instead I suggest you to consider the ThinkPad T series: Iām very satisfied with my T450s and Arch Linux, and I heard that at least the T460 and 470 work great as well
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iām using dell for professional work.
For private i never ever had any major issue with also ācheapā laptops running linux.
For distros i have used: Archlinux, debian/ubuntu, opensuse and fedora.
I think for distros is really a philosophical discussion that will never ends. 
I like personally Ubuntu, Arch and opensuse Leap. With those i never had major pb on laptops. ( be aware iām not saying that with the others distro you have major pbs).
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MacBooks after 2015 are crap and thatās sadly undeniable.
That being said, the MBP 2015 is still the best machine Iāve ever tried in my life, out of the 20+ different ones (and I tried really hard to love Linux on the desktop before). The MBP works at least three times faster than my otherwise pretty beefy gaming PC when it comes to development. Even with an external Apple monitor the MBP 2015 is still not running that hot and fans are spinning hard only when I do a lot of compilation.
Not sure if Apple sees the damage they do on their own brand but they really need to get it together. Right now their only computers worth buying are the MBP 2015 and the mega-expensive iMac Pro 2017 ā since it will likely last you no less than 7 years, if not 10+.
Off-topic: their last two iPhone generations arenāt that remarkable either. Iām seriously contemplating downgrading my X for 8 Plus. The iPad Pros howeverā¦ yeah, good luck to any other vendor beating those, ever.
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