Maybe a slightly controversial stance, but consider straight Debian. With flatpak support in both Plasma and Gnome being stellar, you can have up-to-date apps with a rock solid base that runs on almost anything.

I daily drive a netbook and I use Debian 12 with KDE Plasma on it. The netbook is a 2014 ThinkPad 11e with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM. I find it comfortable for writing and even some Python and JavaScript development. I remote into my servers/cloud infra for more intense development tasks.

+1 for upgrading whatever you can before installing linux. An SSD in particular will go a long way to make it feel snappy.

I honestly love the idea behind the Framework laptops. If I had the cash that is what I would buy.

I recently moved off a combination of Pi 4 and an old netbook to the ODroid H3+. Orders of magnitude faster while having socketed storage and RAM. The best part is the NVME and SATA ports that let me attach 41TB of raw storage and add a data warehousing nature to my setup. 10/10 would buy again.

So real, it was honestly a dumb-fuck moment and I am more than a little embarrassed. That’s what code reviews are for!

I meant under $400, I am an idiot