All i want is a laptop with similar build quality, battery life, and Ubuntu.
I think you should be hopeful for Aeshi Linux.
Asahi Linux. And it is awesome, the future is here. Just waiting for the GPU driver and ... suspend... and brightness and sound.
Yeah. As soon as it’s got feature parity I am getting an m1 Mac to run Linux with i3. And no don’t mention magnet it’s not the same.
You could try Yabai [1], but it's a bspwm clone not an i3 clone. Still not as zippy as the TWMs on linux, but a pretty decent experience overall. There's also Amethyst [2] which kind of replicates xmonad. In most ways they're worse than using the linux ones, though at least you retain the full features of Aqua and Quartz, while trying to integrate i3 or other TWMs with a proper DE in linux remains to be a hassle.