Well after spending all afternoon with this new Dell XPS 13 9315 I absolutely love it. The fit and finish feels exactly like a Macbook Air.
I have Linux installed (Pop_OS) and the only two issues I had were getting the webcam running and the fingerprint reader. I managed getting both of them up and now the hardware is 100% operable! I am so happy I kept giving Linux a go and found a great laptop with few compatibility issues.
Thanks to all of you who recommended Dell laptops. There were a couple minor problems, but both were solvable with a bit of ddg searching.
EDIT: I've decided to return this Dell XPS 13 based on some of your replies about the 12th gen intel being out of date for the price and build quality issues with Dell in general. I went with a Lemur Pro i7 Raptor Lake, 40gb ram, 1tb storage System76 build for only $200 more. Only downside is I have to wait a bit for them to confirm my order, assemble, and ship. It'll be nice to have a machine built exclusively for Linux!
My god an actual trackball user!
Sorry I just hardly ever see any these days.
I have also found PopOS! to be a fantastic distro. Easy to setup, user friendly, has tons of software that works with it , great UI, and I have not had a main OS patch/update break anything since I think 3 years ago now.
And it also does not punish you too hard if you tinker under the hood a bit!
Only real room for improvement is the PopShop, but thats relatively easy to fix, so I do think it makes more sense for them to focus harder on general stability, compatibility, and the new Rust based DE.
You can always install synaptic or the debian software manager for deb based stuff, and a flatpak store if you get tired of the PopShop and want to stick with PopOS's deb/flatpak paradigm.
kde runs terribly on popos tho, so its definitely not the best choice if you need that
Sorry to double post, but ... kind of a huge part of what PopOS! /is/ is making their own DE in Rust.
They originally started prototyping their idea of a DE by modifying GNOME, but ... thats a bit of a story.
They still contribute to GNOME, patching compatibility issues, but they eventually realized that for their window manager and other ideas, they would not be able to convince the largely Ubuntu centric GNOME maintainers to make some critical changes and add needed support that they would need.
So they started two of their own repos to more or less install on top of mainline GNOME and patch in what they needed.
The end result is DE that I find more useful than GNOME in many ways, and PopOS! has since been seemingly largely satisfied with how this has turned out and is now just massively working on developing what will likely be the first ever DE written entirely in Rust.
Yep, thats true.