mleku the disregarded @mleku - 2h
definitely avoid lenovo asus make very nice laptops, so do IBM HP, MSI are ok, but not great if you want to just unpack a linux thing and use it, system76 is good that way if you are ok with using a proprietary OS, my personal recommendation from years doing tech support is asus, nicest overall for the price, is ASUS... Thinkpads are solid also good, but kinda dated looking even the new ones
oh yeah, compaq is pretty good too, probably up there with asus and ibm