Dell developer edition laptops are built for Linux. As usual with laptops there’s a tradeoff between portable and powerful.
Switchable graphics are a pain (anywhere, not just on Linux). I’d recommend getting a machine with passable integrated graphics, and doing any gaming on a desktop.
I had an XPS 13 DE 9360. Nicest laptop I've ever used at first anyway. Fast (enough), thin, light, pre-installed gnu/linux, all day battery life, beautiful 3k screen. But something really annoyed me. After awhile the rubber strips on the bottom of it started to peel off and the glue leaked onto the table, desk or my lap! There was also an issue with firmware updates where the screen would black out after a firmware update. This happened a few times and was eventually why I quit using it. I didn't want to play roulette on my main machine so I had to find something different. Sad because that was one amazing laptop.
Sorry for the delayed response. I'm fairly sure firmware updates happened automatically through update-manager. But at the time I had it set up so I had to initiate all updates so it wouldn't be fully automatic. You can turn them off. That firmware is issue currently resolved. I had to use an external monitor for months. But that glue problem is still there.
Not sure if this works for you but I'm a big fan of having a very powerful desktop that I remote into from a cheap laptop. Especially if you're serious about AI (or gaming, if you can live with not gaming on the go).
I do this with a custom built ryzen + GTX machine running ubuntu 16.04, which I access from an old mac book. Once you get comfortable with your remote dev environment It's a really nice experience.
I do the same for photo editing and gaming. Built a Threadripper machine with a VEGA 64 — yeah, I know —, and then just remote in to edit on Lightroom or use Steam Home Streaming to game on it from a laptop or my Apple TV.
I use ssh. depending on what I'm doing I'll sometimes develop lcoally, then push changes and run experiments on the big machine. Sometimes I want to explore but still have the big guns at the ready, I use jupyter for this and it works really well. I run jupyter on the big machine and open an SSH tunnel to it.
I don't game remotely at all so I can't help you there.
I have a 6th gen x1 carbon and I cannot recommend for Linux(Ubuntu). It got all kinds of overheating problems which had to be addressed by playing with the voltage, errors with the trackpoint/touchpads, and difficulties with going to sleep... It was definitely not a Linux certified laptop at the beginning of this summer.
Not going to answer OP's question that well but I just got a Lenovo V330 because I wanted a cheap and good AMD laptop and it's a good choice for something that works out of the box. Other laptops with Ryzen CPU's may require special kernel parameters to boot but this was painless.
I just went thru this and settled on a Sager, It's a gaming laptop but is a well built platform based on one of the Clevo systems. It's basically a desktop system packed into a laptop form factor, which is perfect for me as I really don't go anywhere where I don't have a plug-in and in the car I just use an inverter. Battery life is only about 2-3 hours, but it's an i-9 system with 64GB of ram.
I tend to buy the top of the line model when I get a new system and run it into the ground before I replace it, I tend to get about 5-7 years out of a laptop. I generally find that this is more cost effective for me than to replace every 2-3 years a mid-line system.
I tend to need a lot of HP because for one of our clients we use VM's to emulate all kinds of devices that run in a mesh and having the whole topology on a single system reduces a lot of noise when debugging.
My previous two laptops where Dell's and I had a really unhappy experience with them, I got about 3 years out of the first until it died and only about a year out of the second. But the straw that broke the camels back for me with them, is the add a 5v line to their charger, if the laptop does not detect this, it pops the thermal protection API and basically cuts your CPU in half. So if you don't replace their crappy chargers that always seem to burn out, with another official Dell charger, you have to hack the thermal API to get it to actually run proper.
Before that I had Mac Book Pro's I liked them but they have just been too slow in offering large ram capacity laptops, I moved on when they held at 16GB for so long. I lost some love for them when they discontinued the 17 line, I understand it, it was just not a volume seller, but I prefer a 17 inch screen as I work on the road a bit and a second monitor is not an option in those cases. But it was really when I could not virtualize the entire network on 16GB that I moved on.
Most of the gaming laptops have solid builds and last, I tend to look at those systems when I look for a developers system, as there is a large overlap in needs. Also gamers tend to be fairly critical of hardware build quality so most game level laptops are of good build quality.
I don't think you can go wrong with a gaming setup from Sager, MSI, Asus or Acer.
All seem to run linux well after some bios tweeks, like turning off secure boot.
Note: I run a Sager NP9176-G3 with Fedora 30 as my base OS, with VMWare Workstation and a host of other OS's as VM's.
I have a higher end Clevo (not rebranded) from late 2017 and I was never able to figure out why the keyboard would drop an input or two every couple dozen seconds. I ended up running various Linux installs as VMs which was fine just not what I was hoping for.
I've had a NP9176 from Sager for a couple years now. Love it now as much as when I got it. Blows my mind how little people consider the Clevos as options. ( Other than System 76, of course. )
Switchable graphics are a pain (anywhere, not just on Linux). I’d recommend getting a machine with passable integrated graphics, and doing any gaming on a desktop.