Linux

if you can compromise on the width, a used thinkpad t480 is under budget, upgrade-able, works fine with any linux and is plenty good enough to do what you need.

I recommend the Thinkpad yoga 11e, which is their education edition. They're out of stock at the moment, but they'll come back soon. They always do. It's an 11 inch laptop with a flip around touch screen and integrated stylus. Works perfectly with Linux. It's not super fast, but it's under 300 dollars new. And it's made for kids so it's durable. I have one and I love it. You can get one used if you like, but at that point you're probably better off with an older model.

I'm using Lenovo ThinkBook, which is cheaper than Thinkpad, and the keyboard layout is different. It supports upto 40GB of RAM.

Yeah get a used laptop. Anything used in good condition is way better than new at the same or often twice the price.

Chromebooks are bad, but they run Coreboot. With MrChromebox and Chrultrabook you can get a normal Coreboot BIOS on there and run any Linux distro.

But they are often not repairable and have extremely limited storage and RAM. Also finding info on many of them is horrible.

Buy an old thinkpad from craigslist. The one I'm using is from 2011 and is perfectly sufficient tech-wise. I'll have to replace it soon, but only because it's falling apart.

Used latitude.

Used ThinkPad

I have an 8 year old Acer aspire and it works great for coding. I've learned a lot about both of those languages with zero worries and recently moved the OS over to nix with excellent results.

It’s probably best to limit yourself to a used laptop.

Reading and writing code is nothing more than reading and writing text, and for that you don’t need a fancy gpu or screen.

What I would recommend you look for in a laptop is

• an SSD instead of an HDD
• more cpu cores (at least 4 cores)
• more memory (RAM) (at least 8GB, preferably 16GB+)

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

And make sure you take regular backups! You never know when your disk will fail.

Also make sure to check linux compatibility before you buy. Laptops used to be a pain (10+ years ago), and it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s not always perfect. Just search for “[brand] [model] linux” or try to find the model on the archlinux wiki.

The good thing about Linux is, it's not very ressouce demanding. If you pick the xfce version of Mint, you can get away with 4GB of RAM. But you won't have that much fun coding as soon as you start something more ressource heavy (big data sets, ML, ...) so this depends a little in which direction you want to go. However see if you can find something used, preferably something you can open from the back side to upgrade components like SSD and RAM (cheaper than buying higher specs)

For Linux I would just find the best ThinkPad within your budget (a used one, in this case)

Edit for an example (and re-edit to clean up link): https://www.ebay.com/itm/134956529143