To be frank, I've never been impressed by system76 laptops. They're more expensive and often bulkier. It seems like they just rebrand name brand laptops and ugly ones at that. Maybe the manufacturing in house will change that.

I bought an ultralight Acer of so-so quality and the thing runs Xubuntu, i3 almost flawlessly out of the box. I'm not going to pretend it's a Macbook Air or XPS but it matches them in function for a lot less money.