If you want to carry a boat around, and don’t need the touch screen, I’m pretty happy with my Alienware 17R4.  I’ve had some weirdness with wireless, but I don’t know if that’s a Mint 18.2 ‘feature’ or what (possibly just a (human) driver issue ;-).

I did find that Mint 17.3 didn’t see the Ethernet OR the Wi-Fi adapters, while Mint 18.2 saw them both and worked fine out of the box.  (I tried to install 17.3 and found no network, so booted the 18.2 live and it all ‘just worked’, so ran the install.  Note that there is a problem with the latest mints where double-clicking on the install icon doesn’t work at all.  You have to run it from the command-line.  Bah, humbug, but at least everything else works.)

But beware, its big, heavy, and very hard to find a backpack for!

Rusty