I was sitting here looking at text between my old 1080 res 15.6" thinkpad and the much higher res of the macbook 16", and it doesn’t really make much of a shit. Ha ha. It really doesn’t. Sure, colors are a little nicer on the macbook, contrast is better, and some things are a little crisper, but meh, since with the sluggishness of the macbook display, the thinkpad display seems overall nicer to the eyes when scrolling around web pages and text files. Go figure. And white text looks overblown on the macbook. It’s a very pretty display to put a picture on. But in practical use? The ancient thinkpad display. And the display size difference is so negligible.
Fun over. Sending it back. Going mac for a day almost killed me from shame. 
Logic Pro did look pretty nice though.
We have all thought of straying from the light at some point. Glad to have you back. 
The 17" screen requirement really reduces the selection of laptops, at first glance there’s a nice Asus out there:
Hardly anywhere sells it from what I can see, and no reviews. The battery life should be alright if you turn off the dGPU and instead of a bag of dongles, an external HDD and some spare cravats you can take a powerbank with you to match the battery power of a handbagtop.
Being practical for what is actually available, I’ll likely have to drop the 17" requirement. And 1080 is not ideal to me, but it’s good enough really.
That Zenbook looks good, but the Nvidia card might be a pain on linux. And yea, finding it available.
I’m eyeballing an HP Omen 16, since they did away with the comic book cosmetics and there are some reports of it running fine on linux (others say otherwise though). Ryzen 7 6800 and RX 6650M. The only real hangup is that HP tends to be bastards about whitelisting wifi cards in their bios, and the stock wifi card is reported to be trash, so replacing it might be a no-go.
Returned. Worth mentioning. While the display on that thing looked very pretty, it was a real eye killer. PWM, slow response time, soft looking fonts (smoothing), and something with the color that I didn’t have time to look into. Back and forth from my old thinkpad to the macbook was very noticeable for eye comfort vs. visual appeal.