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I second System76; I think it's exactly what you're looking for. I don't understand why Canonical doesn't have closer ties to them. System76 even maintains an apt repo for their machines.
I've bought 3 machines from them so far; all worked perfectly out of the box.
This is just a personal opinion, but I also wrote Perl (back in the 90s), and I think that TIMTOWTDI was the reason that it fell out of favor.
TIMTOWTDI makes it hard to share code, even between masters. I believe it's the source of the "Perl is unreadable" meme. Because everyone is capable of defining their own personal dialect of Perl, no solid, common subset emerged.
Compare with the Zen of Python: "There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it." In Python, it's generally very easy for two similarly-skilled Python hackers to share code.
It looks like a Wikipedia editor shares this view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to_...
After years of reading HN, it was your comment that compelled me to register an account.
Thanks for the great comment, sharing with my coworkers and friends.