> I do need polished hardware that I can walk into a store and try out
Doesn’t this apply to my first two suggestions? The Dell XPS Developer Edition is the same hardware as the Windows version, just with Ubuntu preinstalled. And Dell has upstreamed the drivers. Similar with Lenovo hardware, except IIUC they haven’t started shipping Linux preinstalled yet, you just buy a normal Thinkpad and install your distro of choice. Purism has a basic return policy, though IIUC you have to pay shipping and, if there’s no hardware defect, a 10% restocking fee: https://puri.sm/policies/. System76 has a 30-Day Limited Money Back Guarantee linked in their websites footer: https://system76.com/warranty (^f 30 and hit enter a couple times).
> if the kernel drops support for my hardware
Is there precedent for this? It still supports 32-bit CPUs long after most people have upgraded — indeed certain distros like Ubuntu have stopped supporting them, but there are probably hundreds of other distros that haven’t done that¹, like Devuan, which also champions init freedom and maintains a list of a ~two dozen Free distros/OSes that don’t force systemd: https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom
> Doesn’t this apply to my first two suggestions? The Dell XPS Developer Edition is the same hardware as the Windows version, just with Ubuntu preinstalled. And Dell has upstreamed the drivers. Similar with Lenovo hardware, except IIUC they haven’t started shipping Linux preinstalled yet, you just buy a normal Thinkpad and install your distro of choice.
Drivers make a lot of difference to the feel of a trackpad, I wouldn't want to buy without testing the actual drivers. I wanted to like the XPS but its keyboard felt too rubbery to me. The idea of buying something and then shipping it back really doesn't appeal to me (I'm not from the US and the idea of just returning stuff isn't so much in our culture); I really want to go to an actual showroom-like store, try out a bunch of different laptops, and then walk away with the one I like, and I accept paying a premium for that. (I'm sure others will feel different, and maybe I'm not being reasonable; just trying to describe where I'm coming from).
> Is there precedent for this?
Yes, I've had three different pieces of hardware go unsupported in Linux (Logitech QuickCam USB - eventually support reappeared in a different driver; Asus A730W PDA; an old Hauppauge TV tuner card). Linux is openly really hostile about out-of-tree drivers (no stable API as a matter of policy) which the first two were, but even in-tree drivers are aggressively deprecated (the Hauppauge driver was one of those). I switched to FreeBSD on my home server because I was just fed up with all the churn of Linux and it's been a lot better.
Doesn’t this apply to my first two suggestions? The Dell XPS Developer Edition is the same hardware as the Windows version, just with Ubuntu preinstalled. And Dell has upstreamed the drivers. Similar with Lenovo hardware, except IIUC they haven’t started shipping Linux preinstalled yet, you just buy a normal Thinkpad and install your distro of choice. Purism has a basic return policy, though IIUC you have to pay shipping and, if there’s no hardware defect, a 10% restocking fee: https://puri.sm/policies/. System76 has a 30-Day Limited Money Back Guarantee linked in their websites footer: https://system76.com/warranty (^f 30 and hit enter a couple times).
> if the kernel drops support for my hardware
Is there precedent for this? It still supports 32-bit CPUs long after most people have upgraded — indeed certain distros like Ubuntu have stopped supporting them, but there are probably hundreds of other distros that haven’t done that¹, like Devuan, which also champions init freedom and maintains a list of a ~two dozen Free distros/OSes that don’t force systemd: https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom
¹Edit: Distrowatch lists 40 active distros that support i386, 102 active that don’t use systemd, and 25 active (and 115 non-active) that meet both of those criteria : https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=All&o...