Since you're looking for premium laptops: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is a great laptop and is available with Ubuntu pre-loaded abroad. Not sure if they offer that service here in India. Or you could consider a Pixelbook (Go) that has a Linux VM for development. Finally, Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a great laptop and has good Linux support. All of these are quite expensive in India compared to their US/EU prices. Getting a friend to bring it will be the cheapest and most reliable way currently.

Thanks a lot for input. Will try to figure the way out.

The XPS13 windows model hardware are most of the time are identical to the DE version. They should work out of the box on any Linux distribution since hw drivers are already in mainline kernel. So if you don’t have an option to buy them from outside cheaper or don’t want to wait, you can buy the model selling in India and flash the distro of your choice.

Possibly the biggest differences are around specific high-end CPU SKUs and additional memory, SSD options that are available in the DE version and not the consumer version. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to build Android, anything less than 32GB of memory and a fast NVME/SSD will cause lots of angst. Same thing if you want to run lots of VMs to learn about orchestration. But otherwise, any of these are solid laptops that'll last a long time.

I do need android studio (as I do lot of app testing on studio) and also to play around with mobile test automation. Will keep that in mind. Thanks!