My best Linux experience laptop continues to be the venerable ThinkPad X200 (circa 2008). It has perfect Linux support - every single piece of hardware works with drivers in the upstream kernel. It has good battery life, it's lightweight, and it's very durable - it's almost 10 years old and both of mine look brand new. The keyboard, RAM, disk, etc is all user-upgradable and each screw is labelled so you know what to remove to get into which components. The keyboard is the best I've ever seen in a laptop - and it's user replacable. The laptop has WiFi, ethernet, bluetooth, a fingerprint reader, and a webcam, all of which work perfectly with open source drivers. The hardware is so well understood that I've also had most of it work correctly on NetBSD, Minix, Haiku, and 9front. 9front! It's also supported by coreboot.
It's not an 8-core powerhouse, but I don't expect that from my laptop. It compiles the Linux kernel in about 10 minutes on one (of two) cores. It runs KVM just fine. If I need to do something really heavy I'll SSH into some remote box that can handle it better, but I've done that pretty rarely. It copes very well with almost any workload I've given it.
You can pick one up on eBay for anywhere from $40-$150. No other laptop even comes close for me. Is it glamorous? No. Does it play games? No. But it's the best damn laptop you will ever use.
A few years back, I decided I wanted to try out Linux after finally getting tired of Windows (which I'd used all through school). I bought a Thinkpad X200 for $65 on eBay. I had Linux up and running on it in an hour, and used it happily until I bought my 2013 11-inch Macbook Air (which for my money is the perfect machine in terms of form factor, I'll use it until it dies). Thinkpads are impressive machines.
It's not an 8-core powerhouse, but I don't expect that from my laptop. It compiles the Linux kernel in about 10 minutes on one (of two) cores. It runs KVM just fine. If I need to do something really heavy I'll SSH into some remote box that can handle it better, but I've done that pretty rarely. It copes very well with almost any workload I've given it.
You can pick one up on eBay for anywhere from $40-$150. No other laptop even comes close for me. Is it glamorous? No. Does it play games? No. But it's the best damn laptop you will ever use.