I hate to be That Guy, but every time I've bought a laptop, I've managed to get it to sufficient usefulness within a couple of weeks of tinkering. Which is a pain but I typically then get 3-5 years of (mostly) trouble-free operation out of it, so it seems like a worthwhile deal.
That being said, NVIDIA GPUs are a huge headache and my Linux experience is a lot better with AMD or Intel. Since I don't do GPU intensive stuff, YMMV.