Laptop for SW Development with Good Battery

Currently using a 2019 16" Intel i7 Macbook Pro - I'm wanting to downsize my laptop to a 14" and since buying the Macbook I've swapped all my home computers to run Ubuntu Desktop and would like to try the same on a laptop. A few ideals: 8+ hour battery life with a few development apps open (Probably firefox with around 20 tabs, VSCode + GH Copilot, Spotify), nice display quality, lightweight (<4lb), solid build quality, price of around $1300 or less, and at least 32GB of RAM (if RAM is upgradeable then I don't particularly care). I'm fairly certain a M3 Mac meets all my requirements (but no Ubuntu), but wanted help exploring other options. Appreciate any help.