Wow, a very impressive lineup. Their performance laptop even has the optional second GPU - never seen that in a laptop before.

If only they had a trackpoint style pointing device, that would be my perfect next laptop!

How's battery life? That was always my concern, it seemed to be quite pathetic in comparison to modern 6-12hr competitors.

It depends on what you're doing of course. Normal usage (playing music/Youtube, browsing firefox, coding, opening up some PDFs) gives me about 6-8 hours I'd say, I get about 3 hours of (modded) minecraft, which is quite the battery drain. this is on Gentoo (Awesome as WM) so the background drain is pretty low. It's good enough that I never really pay attention to it.

upower says the battery is designed to store up to 48Wh, with a maximum design capacity of 53Wh.

Is the battery controller programmable from Linux? E.g. can you set charging thresholds?

Is there any hardware in it that doesn't work in Linux?

I don't know about the battery controller, all of it works with Linux (System76 is a Linux retailer after all).