If you are super cheap like me, but enjoy well made machines try out an ancient macbook pro. I have a 2011 macbook pro 13" with the first gen (I think?) I5 CPU and 4gb ram. Got it from eBay, it used to belong to a school and someone ground the engraving off the lid, but there is a vinyl skin covering the damage.

It only cost me $40 Canadian, the battery lasts like new, and it came with a new charger. I installed arch Linux, on a new sata ssd, and its been great! WiFi was harder to get setup, but I figured it out. Can’t get Bluetooth working…

I love that it has a DVD drive, many ports including Ethernet, SD card, enough USB.

Its slow, but keeps up with everything I do… Mainly use it for watching YouTube, watching my jellyfin library, listening to music, using telegram, light python projects, some web site development with Hugo, and I ssh into my main PC with it.

I got two laptops from local electronics recycling this past month. One of them is 2020 spec and just needed a charger and some dents smoothed out. Can’t beat rescuing something that’s going in the trash, sustainability wise. If you’re going on the actual used market, Thinkpad like everyone else said.

I like my Panasonic CF-RZ6 a lot, it has i5-7y57 with 8GB ram and mSATA 512GB SSD. 10" size and 1920x1200 display about ~700g, also has many USB3, RJ45, 3.5mm jack, HDMI and DSUB(!). Sadly the battery life is mediocre, parts are impossible to find. And it’s generally hard as hell to find outside japan. I’m not in Japan but was very lucky to find one for about 150$USD in second hand market.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for you, but I will say that

• pretty much every modern Chromebook will be able to have Linux installed over ChromeOS. You might have to open it up and remove a write-protect screw.

• Linux is a surprisingly good platform for games these days, actually. Steam has done a lot of work to get it there.

• If you’re wanting lightweight specs, you’re probably going to find the best bang for your buck in an old Chromebook; however, I don’t know if you’ll see as many of those coming on the market, and you’ll want to watch out for old school devices. Those things get worked over pretty hard.

Thinkpads were basically made for Linux, depending on your Budget you can get a Thinkpad X220, X230, T420 or T430 for small money - perfectly usesble machines and Linux (my experience is CachyOS & Arch) work out of the box.

For a bigger budget i could recomment the T480, it’s still upgradeable.

And for a bigger budget i’d recommend a T14 GEN2

You could try to get a dell xps 13”. I currently have fedora installed on my xps 15 that’s about 11 years old and it’s been working pretty well. I’ve replaced the battery and changed storage on mine so they’re fairly serviceable. Built pretty sturdy and have great keyboards and trackpads. Good screens too.

Try locally. Facebook marketplace is huge in the USA. It’s a royal pain to sell tech offline, so you get good deals. Selection is worse so just broaden your search or be patient.

Business laptops are more rugged and serviceable. 4chan’s /g/ has a thread for “thinkpad general” which is all the business laptops. (Mind the 4chan racism and transphobia.) I’ve found that Dells are far more common (and thus cheap) than comparable HPs or Thinkpads.

For some price comparison, I sold a 6th gen Intel Dell laptop with a 1080p screen for about $60. On ebay they run $40-$100.

Specs aren’t too important. I like my distros lightweight, and a web browser will be the most demanding thing it’ll run.

web browsers are pretty fucking heavy these days, I think the minimum spec for an “ok” experience is a 3rd gen quad core “mobile” chip like the 3612qm or an 8th gen quad core “ultrabook” chip like the 8650u

I love thinkpad L480. Also, if you get a good deal then try getting Macbook 2017 Intel version. You could install Linux on that and it’s quite light weight.

I got a thinkpad E14 off of eBay for $400. There was a slight haircrack in the hinge, but it came with 40gb of ram 1tb ssd and amd ryzen 7730u I believe. I always recommend looking on eBay first, it’s likely you can find a $1000+ laptop for $400 like I did.

I love the Panasonic toughbooks. Most of them have a handle so they’re great to carry around like a briefcase. Had mine in the boot during driver safety training, it got knocked around voilently, not a single scratch. Also put a SSD in, running it with pop OS since many years.

Here is a good resource for whether you can install another OS on a particular Chromebook

The Pinebook Pro is unfortunately not a very good laptop. It’s very slow, has a weird storage setup, and the hardware isnt 100% supported by any distro even now, years later. The battery also takes forever to charge and doesnt last all that long.

I get better performance on a Raspberry Pi 4 and even that is too slow for me

It was a cool idea and if the software support was there it might have become a very compelling laptop, but as it currently exists the PBP is not worth what it costs

I have a Thinkpad X395 which I bought refurbished. I has average specs for a laptop, you can find it with up to 16 GB of RAM and a quite nice 1080p touchscreen (depending on the configuration). Also it may come with a fingerprint reader, an LTE modem or a Smartard reader. I don’t know how serviceable it is because I have never opened it but you can easily remove the keyboard by unclipping some clips and undoing some screws, you don’t have to open the case

I’ve had good luck with a couple Latitude 7280 laptops. Replaceable parts, with support for an NVMe drive. There’s only one RAM slot, compared to the 7390 (I think), but a 16gb DDR4 SODIMM stick shouldn’t be hard to find.