I'm glad the AMD GPU option still exists, I don't have great experience with NVIDIA on Linux. The rest of the upgrades, like the new top cover and keyboard, are very welcome
It's so weird to hear people who have problems with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, because for me it's always been the opposite. I have had problems with AMD but never with NVIDIA.
Maybe things have improved, or support was just never that good for older NVIDIA GPU's (for reference, last time I used Nvidia on Linux I was running Fedora on a Thinkpad P50, which I think has a Quadro M1000M gpu), but it'd be a costly experiment to find