7430 is a nice system. I've done a lot with 7400/7410/7420 systems and some of my friends use them daily for programming.
Sure 16G is a restriction in some ways and some compilers take so much ram that make -j10 will fail on 16G but it's still pretty decent.
What OS are you using? Linux works nicely on 16G, Windows is usable but not so good.
What parts of the Linux community do you see this in?
The parts I'm in have no Nazis and not much right wing support because right wing nowadays trends Nazi.
There's really no difference between running Linux on desktop and laptop systems. As you have done it in a desktop the laptop will really be no big deal for you.
Sometimes drivers aren't quite as good and maybe battery life won't be as great. But laptop batteries last for ages nowadays so even a small reduction won't hurt for most uses.
I've run a fleet of Linux laptops when doing corporate IT department work and run more than a few for myself and helped out friends. Generally everything works well enough.
Debian has an option to anonymously report packages installed. There's a question about this at install time and at any time you can install or uninstall the popularity-contest package.
There's no real difference between different brands of laptops that matters to distributions. In most cases there's not even a difference between desktops and laptops that matters to distribution choice.
ThinkPads have always been well supported by Linux and older laptops are even better for support as there's no issue of hardware newer than drivers.
https://matrix.org/category/dma/
There is work in progress to address this compelled by EU legislation.
Thanks for the advice, I installed the Debian package "read-edid" and used the get-edid program from it to get the EDID from the monitor. Then I installed the "wxedid" package to display it graphically because the parse-edid program from read-edid didn't work well. According to wxedid there's a seletion of 38402160 modes and some 40962160 modes. So it seems that the EDID is the problem.
MAXSUN Intel Arc B580 Milestone 12G Graphics Card (MS-ARC-B580-MILESTONE-12G
The above is the cheapest card from my local store that has DisplayPort 2.1 (the rest have 1.4). It's $469 compared to $199 for a RX 6400 or RX 6500. I can probably find somewhere cheaper to buy these things but I'm working on the assumption that the ratios of prices are going to be about the same.
From the Wikipedia page it looks like DSC is needed to do 8K@60Hz on DisplayPort 1.4. I think that is bad for text though.
That card has DisplayPort 1.4 which means that if HDMI doesn't work then it's limited to HBR3 which gives 24bpp@31Hz, which is barely adequate.
Also how do you set the bpp rates? The DisplayPort wikipedia page says that 24bpp and 30bpp are supported, but how do I even know which is in use?
For people who know as much about technology as most people in this discussion the thing to do if short of cash would be to buy a cheaper phone. I recently got myself a quite decent Note9 for $109AU and I could have got something even cheaper if I needed to. But many people aren't as well informed, the above article is one example of people who are less well off being scammed by a corporation.
For my home workstation running Debian/Bookworm I started running Wayland-Plasma when Xorg mysteriously refused to work after replacing my video card. Wayland just worked and really had no issues for me so while I'm sure I could have solved the X11 problem I didn't have a real need to.
I also changed my laptop to Wayland-Plasma more recently. A problem I had was in setting up the right modes for external monitors on laptops but that seems to work OK now. Generally things just work.
A year ago I was working for a company that used such PC in the cloud services. 10 months of renting that cost about the same as buying an equivalent laptop. It wasn't good.
If you mostly need a machine for word-processing and do something intense for an hour a week there might be a possibility of saving money, but for regular use no way.
Also if you have an office where people occasionally need a powerful system then just buy one powerful PC and have them share.