The Nexus model chooses a manufacturer and then works with them to create the current year's creation. I'm not sure Canonical has enough resource or leverage to do that.
That said, I'd love to see an Apple-esque model where I could point to 3 laptops each year and say "large, medium, and small" and know that they would work completely with zero fussing.
Maybe Canonical could start down this road by refitting their devs with new laptops on an annual cycle and saying, "these are the laptops we will be using this year."
I'm a NetBSD-to-Apple switcher (circa 2003) who has a fair bit of ambient familiarity with Ubuntu as his auxiliary OS. I don't run any proprietary system beyond what comes bundled with OS X nowadays. I could switch to Ubuntu for day-to-day work and be perfectly content.
I can say that the SOLE factor of why I haven't has everything to do with not finding a rival to my MacBook Air 11". Part of that may be there simply isn't a comparable machine. But part of that may be that the hassle of searching for alternatives is simply too great.
There is the Dell XPS 13 developer edition which comes from Dell with Ubuntu... ThinkPads work great with Ubuntu (at least the T, X, and W series), I've been using a T530 for a few years now and every single function key, the fingerprint reader, absolutely every feature it has works. And of course there are a few boutique manufacturers that ship Linux systems.
I'm sure other laptops work great with Ubuntu but these are the ones I'm familiar with...
I use one of the boutique systems (the ZaReason UltraLap) as my work laptop and like it a lot, but when my home laptop started to give up the ghost for the fourth or fifth time (a 6-year old Dell Inspiron 1525), I realized that for home use I need the secondary parts market to be active. I fix computers that break (the Inspiron is on its second motherboard, third power board, and the screen and backlight inverter of someone else's 1525 that they were throwing out.) The ThinkPad T430 is cheap enough that it often undercuts the boutiques, but I'm not locked out of ebaying for a new power board.
System76 [0] has launched its business in this area: taking a hardware, tuning Ubuntu to work out of the box on it, and supporting it. You get the assurance that your system will just work.
I haven't tried them but I hope they have good business doing what seems to be the real solution here.
Yeah, but they don't ship with international keyboards and Canonical don't test on System76 hardware in any special way, so it can break on any upgrade.
Any other company with their own Linux distro and hardware would also work, I guess. I really like Unity, though.