Well after spending all afternoon with this new Dell XPS 13 9315 I absolutely love it. The fit and finish feels exactly like a Macbook Air.
I have Linux installed (Pop_OS) and the only two issues I had were getting the webcam running and the fingerprint reader. I managed getting both of them up and now the hardware is 100% operable! I am so happy I kept giving Linux a go and found a great laptop with few compatibility issues.
Thanks to all of you who recommended Dell laptops. There were a couple minor problems, but both were solvable with a bit of ddg searching.
EDIT: I've decided to return this Dell XPS 13 based on some of your replies about the 12th gen intel being out of date for the price and build quality issues with Dell in general. I went with a Lemur Pro i7 Raptor Lake, 40gb ram, 1tb storage System76 build for only $200 more. Only downside is I have to wait a bit for them to confirm my order, assemble, and ship. It'll be nice to have a machine built exclusively for Linux!
One word: aptitude. Learn no mark your packages as dependency installed (capital M) and do it every update. The only downside is that it doesn't sync that info with synaptic. But if you use it exclusively for package management you'll end up with little to no stay packages after dist-upgrade.
The interface is very similar to and predates synaptic, but it's a terminal tool in ncurses. So even if you lose access to the GUI you still have something friendly to try and recover.