I've used pre-owned corporate thinkpads for years. At least in here we have multiple of stores to purchase previously leased (and since wiped+inspected) laptops for quite cheap (your definition of cheap may vary). Just now I have one waiting at the post office, T495 for 299€. Granted that's never been a top line model, but it's well sufficient for my usage and it'll happily replace the old x240 I've been lugging around.
I've ran them with ubuntu/debian, dualboot and pretty much every combination. They just seem to work, altough there may be more or less hiccups specially with keyboard lights and (to me) minor things like that. Networking, hardware itself, suspend and everything else just works. And there's mountains of information on various wikis etc to check before purchasing.