Garmin 965

Until I got to the Forerunner 965, my Garmins would easily scratch. I have an Instinct with such a deep gash I cannot see the top 1/4 of the display. The 965 display is wonderful but I still have a couple minor nicks.

To be honest, my Garmin watches always felt like engineering marvels to me. Rugged, very long battery lives, small form factors, and for many years at the forefront of what was thought possible. Progress slowed down somewhat, but I still get a lot of joy out of them (currently a Forerunner 965). I haven’t been wearing my mechanical watch for ages. And as a sports watch they are very hard to beat

By and large Garmin devices can be accessed directly from a Linux system. I have a FR 965 and it connects just fine. But in typical Garmin fashion, there may be a hard to find setting to enable this. My watch asks if I want to connect to a computer when I plug in the cable.

That's funny, phone related features are the first things I turn off on my Garmin watch when I set it up. The last thing I want is my wrist buzzing off when I am focused lol. In fact, any notifications on my wrist are just flat out obnoxious. I'll take my multiple weeks of battery life for a single charge on the Forerunner 965. The data and analytics are fantastic as well.

My Garmin 965 lasts about a month, I can't believe it compared to my pixel watch which is flat in a day. Haven't touched it since.

I'm currently using a 965 and I love it. That said, I came to it from fitbit so maybe my views are warped. Generally, just turning over my wrist to look at it works exceptionally well at showing everything, a firm tap works when that doesn't. The 1 to 2 weeklong battery life is also great. It's really one of my favorite watches. My wife has the pixel watch 2 and holy cow does the battery on that thing suck. She never uses the sleep function because the damn thing is empty at the end of every day. Like 14 hours of battery life max in normal usage.

Not OP but I’ve used Garmin’s for about 15 years and over 10k running miles. I don’t like or use non-fitness related smart watch features, so I can’t speak to those or recommend a good "smart watch that also does fitness". If you want top of the line with more data than you’ll know what to do with and a ton of fitness activity tracking beyond running, the Epix2, Fenix 7, or Forerunner 965 (I have the Epix2). A step down but still great is the Forerunner 265. The feature they all have and I think has been the most useful is the Training Readiness. It looks at a bunch of different metrics, both current (your HRV, last workout performance, sleep, stress) and chronic (your weekly and monthly total exercise amount, types of running, etc) and advises you on how hard you should train and suggests a running activity for the day. It is basically a digital running coach/personal trainer that makes sure you are getting a good mix between tempo runs, long runs, easy runs, etc. and makes sure you aren’t overtraining or if a bad day means to switch to a light workout. I normally use it loosely to inform my choices but I’ve tried using its daily training plans exclusively and it was very good at keeping me progressing. Hopefully this helps.