https://www.thinkpenguin.com - not a lot of choices there, but the hardware should be linux (and possibly BSD) compatible. The machines mostly come with either parabola or trisquel preinstalled (I think I saw Mint also).
edit: although it looks like one can choose from several distributions to install. I probably was seeing mostly parabola and trisquel because I came across this one on gnu.org 
I was wondering how obvious Appleâs advantage is in having hardware and software development in one hand, making it easier to optimize the two than other manufacturers.
The stability issue was that, as I wrote above, Apple can more easily optimize hardware and software for each other because they are both in one hand. How much of this benefit comes out of the two different platform laptops / tablets?
For general use, none
If youâre using a laptop/tablet as intended with supported hardware it doesnât matter. You might be able to run benchmarks and measure a difference but mostly the idea doesnât hold up a ton in the realm of general purpose machines.
Now if this was referring to specialized machines or game consoles that could be another story.
I use a laptop (tablet less) for both general and test purposes. The game matters less.
This is incredibly well demonstrated with SSDâs. In benchmarks NVMe SSDâs CRUSH the benchmark results of SATA SSDâs. But put 2 (mostly) identical machines in front of someone the only major difference being 1 has a NVMe drive and the other a SATA drive, and unless itâs the newest high performance PCIe 4.0x4 NVMe driveâŚwhile the benchmarks might show a huge difference, will you be able to FEEL the difference? Most likely not at all. Yes, not QUITE the exact same thing, but itâs a good demonstration of how difference in performance and difference in PERCEPTIBLE performance are quite different.
Another example of the difference in perception v realityâŚ
My âoldâ system takes 27 seconds to boot from reset. 3 secs to BIOS, 7 secs to rEFInd, 17 secs to login.
My ânewâ system takes less than 20 secs to boot from reset. 9 secs to BIOS, 6 secs to rEFInd, 4+ secs to login.
No prizes for guessing which âfeelsâ faster, despite the total elapsed time 
Edit: All times approximate - new system: sometimes 11 secs to Bios, sometimes 5 secs to rEFInd and 5 secs to loginâŚ
Or with how people do all these âoptimized Linux kernelsâ which end up with mostly no differences in performance vs generic.
If hardware is well designed and software well written you donât really even need to be concerned as you wonât feel any difference
In the realm of tablets if thatâs what youâre looking for they usually are tailored to their hardware.
I.E the kernel,drivers,etc. In Samsung are made specifically for that hardware. The Pinetab even is tailored and âoptimizedâ for its hardware.
Although to be fair it ONCE was effective. When I STARTED using Arch it was for this reason. Most distroâs were still optimized for 486, some even for 386 (yes, Iâm dating myself), while Arch was 686 optimized. While Gentoo could get even MORE optimized, there was a PERCEPTIBLE (like how Iâm tying it into prior posts, pretty snazzy, eh) difference in performance from say, Debian or Mandrake to Arch, while the difference from Arch to Gentoo was generally not enough to be percieved (and definitely not worth waiting 18 hours for updates to finish).
Generally now, yeah, no point in optimizingâŚamd64 is amd64; arm64 is arm64; etc. for the most part. Sure, you can get better multimedia performance with some optimizations if your processor has it, but to me, just not worth it.
True, but also back in the day overclocking my P2 50mhz was a lot or having 256mb of RAM was plenty lol
Oh how times have changed
Yeah. I still have fond memories of changing a jumper and getting a 50% frequency boost (Celeron 300A)âŚthose were the days.
Your day doesnât go back far enough! 
I donât have to go far to remember âdrowningâ in 7Mb RAM on my Amiga - so much so that I ran RAMdisks to make use of it! Or selling a PC clone as hi-zoot because it came with 640K
Ok, some of that goes back past where I was using computers even (I REMEMBER when it was common, I just didnât have the funds to have a computer).
Not all of us who had computers back then had the funds either⌠some of us worked in computer stores for that reason!
Yeah, that wasnât really an option either. Where I grew up, cows, pigs, horses and dogs outnumbered humans for a multiple mile radius, so until I got a car I couldnât get a job except on farms. And then unless I was willing to drive 60+ miles, there was only Radio Shack as the only computer store (and given how early(-ish) they went out of business, they didnât have ANY turnover in employees it seemed). Yes, I grew up in the COUNTRYâŚ
Probably explains why I live in a city nowâŚ
Although eventually DID end up going into IT a few years after getting my first computer that was actually MINE (pentium MMX 133).
Looks good. The bad news is that itâs only available with a Spanish keyboard layout for now.
Schenker - Tuxedo