I am also the happy owner of a Dell Precision, but an even older model, 7510, so 6-years old. It has never had any HW problem, despite intensive use, including during many business trips.

It was also bought with Ubuntu, but I have wiped that and I have installed Gentoo, as this is what I prefer. Support for Linux has been perfect, for all included peripherals, e.g. Thunderbolt, video camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, card reader, etc.

This heavier model has a modest battery life, which is normal for a laptop containing the top Mobile Xeon CPU and the top NVIDIA Quadro GPU of that year. Unlike lighter laptops, it has excellent cooling, which allows the CPU to dissipate 60 W for an indefinite time (despite the official TDP of only 45 W) allowing the fast compilation of large software projects, without thermal throttling and without excessive noise.

I develop software for embedded computers, so a I need a laptop like this Dell Precision 7000 series, with a large number of USB ports and with Ethernet, to be able to connect to various prototypes and development boards.

In conclusion, I can recommend the Dell Precision 7000 series for software development, especially under Linux. Unfortunately, they are rather overpriced, which is also true about all the other laptops labelled as "mobile workstations".