[jvan]

Seconding System76. I bought one for my wife after HP and Dell refurbs failed to be stable for her, so instead of trying to find a reasonably priced (<$800) business-class laptop we blew the budget on a $1500 Pangolin that's done well by her for several years.

My daily driver is a desktop because I'm an old fart that likes to build computers (with optical disc drives!), but I have a truly ancient HP Elitebook refurb with a dented lid that still takes care of me on vacation. Neither of us do anything fancier than use an HDMI projector with them so we're not asking for much. It really stung to be compiling Realtek modules for the HP only for it to crash every week and the Latitude to have a disappearing sound card, even for budget refurbs.