ThinkPads run like a dream. Not sure about the versions with dedicated cards however. I’m also not sure if they’re releasing any with AMD cpus, might want to look that up.
Get anything with a preinstalled Linux on them. I hear Dell, Lenovo and System76 has such offerings. The reason why I recommend this is you will be far more likely to have everything working out of the box directly.
System76 is nice because they offer coreboot, which pretty much removes all that flakiness with suspend and resume.
Unfortunately neither of them offer a Renoir based product at the moment, but hopefully will later this year.
As for Nvidia graphics - if you can get a hold of a Renoir system those outperform most of the Nvidia portable GPUs like the MX450. If you still go with an Nvintel machine (not a bad option, just not the optimal one IMO), it should work out of the box though, given that Linux will be preinstalled.
FYI Linux can be installed on most gaming laptops these days, there are fully functional projects that utilize the dual GPUs in most notebook laptops and the Nvidia driver is effortlessly installed with negativo17’s repo for fedora I’ve had an Acer predator 17 with an i7 8core and gtx980m running dual gpu’s seamlessly on fedora for over 2 years, and this is when they first started using hybrid gpu notebooks.
I have an asus rog zephryrus g14 and everything works perfectly in manjaro (well except the fingerprint scanner, no linux drivers for that). The g15 is basically the same laptop with a 15 inch screen instead and it’s hitting right at your price point.