[mtift]

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t460

If you need 32GB of RAM, then the ThinkPad T460 would qualify. And Lenovo claims it has 18 hours of battery life, which seems more than decent to me.

I switched from MacBook Pros to the ThinkPad T Series running GNU/Linux a few years ago and I have not been disappointed. My only caveat is that I like to run Debian stable, and that seems to work better on older ThinkPads, especially for things like video chats. In my experience, the newer ThinkPads work better with distros that use newer kernels (at least I think that is why), such as Ubuntu or Fedora.

I would have suggested the T460s, which is lighter, but that only goes up to 20GB of RAM.

[Symmetry]

I have a T460p and I'm very happy with it. I can't give you a precise battery life but I've stopped plugging my laptop in when I'm using it outside the house. The only problems I've had have had to do with running Linux with a high DPI screen.

[vacri]

If it's just the age of the kernel worrying you, have a look at the backported kernels for debian stable.