Ubuntu is god-awful. It's like everything that's wrong with windows with none of the advantages.
what would be a good little cheapie laptop ($300?) to use as a full-commit platform to try out linux and/or BSD?
I'd go with something at least Skylake and above for an old Notebook personally. Even former expensive business models you can get for around $200 used. Preferably I'd go with anything beginning with Kaby Lake because that's the point where you get usable x265/V9 decoding in hardware. Skylake is fast enough to do it in software at reasonable bitrates to e.g. 1080p, but hardware decoding will be better for the battery. If you want to run a lightweight Linux the Core M processors are pretty good, are as fast and faster than more current Celerons and are often in devices that are fanless. (No mechanical parts in an old notebook you might have to replace and which might or might not be available as spare part anymore for an not-inflated price) Also fanless devices are just nicer. You see a lot of these devices popping up with refurbishers because I'm guessing they're not "Win11 compatible" which for Linux, does not matter. The better hardware decoding features of later generations are not only interesting for videos from the net, but also for streaming of programs from your more powerful PC, which is a thing you can do in Linux.
Always consider this: The speed of a given CPU in such a mobile device is highly dependent on how good the cooling is, many business notebooks have reasonable cooling, many of these cheap more recent consumer-grade "Netbooks" do not, so even if they might have a faster CPU on paper, it'll quickly run into thermal limits, applying throttling and be slower.
Apropos thermal limits: Some intel devices have
RAPL values predefined in their firmware (and possibly locked down so you can't change them) some do not. RAPL basically tells a SoC "ok, there's enough cooling for you to dissipate this amount of watts, try to stay in that bracket". As you can imagine, it affects speed, but also how hot the device gets. Many manufacturers just let 'er rip until the SoC runs into thermal limits which is not great for the hardware (but probably looks better in benchmarks and makes a better first impression) especially since the battery which is often in the area doesn't like to be heated to e.g. 60C. If no RAPL limits are set, you can set them in Linux and for mobiles I'd always advise it. Properly set, most devices barely get warm no matter what you do and while they might not clock as high as without limits, will also never need to limit themselves to ridiculously low speeds as it happens when thermal throttling sets in and will be able to run at their (limited) clock with a sustained load stably. It also of course can improve battery lifetime greatly as a secondary effect. I don't know if Windows screws with RAPL, no Linux distro I know of does. I'd consider reasonable RAPL limits pre-set in the firmware as a sign of engineering quality.
A few additional info bits in no particular order:
Try to stick to devices with only an iGPU. dGPU&iGPU combos can still be problematic in Linux sometimes and you can run into a situation where things will straight up just not work for the particular device that you bought. Linux can still be full of such "landmines" when it comes to mobile devices.
When I looked into older convertibles, I noticed that there's an alarming amount of people reporting problems with Dell batteries just straight up dying, I'd look into that too.
Don't get anything with an god-awful 1366x768 TN screen which are very popular in this area for cost cutting measures. You will not enjoy it. IPS or bust for a mobile device, alone for the viewing angles.
4 GB of RAM are fine in Linux if you know what you're doing, 8 GB of RAM are great. If you don't have specific use cases where you know you'll need more, you're comfortably set with 8 in most cases.
While it's true that Lenovo is largely a meme these days and some of the (especially non-Thinkpad series) Lenovo devices are downright flimsy, Lenovo has an largely unmatched support in Linux in many areas regarding platform-specific features and quirks, especially when it comes to the battery. With most Lenovo devices you get full control over the battery in Linux and can script how far to charge it, and can even start and stop charging and discharging manually. If you plan to use the device a lot connected to AC, reasonable settings here can greatly prolong battery life. You do not get any of these options with most other manufacturers, even though you might get controls in firmware. Keeping a mobile device connected all the time and charged to 100% is often not good for the battery.
![:\](/styles/custom/emotes/svg/chris-confused.svg "Confused :\")
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charger, despite it the same charger another HP laptop was using. Dell and HP uses the same chargers.
