I think chromebooks are pretty locked down these days. The old ones you can unlock and install Linux on the bare metal are underpowered. 4g RAM and 64g storage typically. I use one as a touch screens for home Assistant and to run Pihole.

I would recommend a Think Pad with 4 cores and 8g RAM from eBay. Should be plenty for your use case and cheap. I have a 10 or 12 year old idea pad that I use about the same way you do and it still running great with PopOs.

I've got a Dell 1500 series laptop that I've been running Ubuntu on for several years. It is thicker than many modern computers but not to thick as to be uncomfortable to carry. The touch screen even works with Ubuntu Mate. It is slow to boot owing to a very slow hard drive but ok once booted, however the battery is sick so I'm getting ready to perform surgery and replace the hard drive with an SSD and replace the battery.

I've recently got myself an Acer Aspire 15 with AMD chip set and I am quite satisfied with the machine and how Mint just works with it.

I've been enjoying my Thinkpad E16 1st gen AMD on Debian 12. You do have to run a newer kernel to get it working. I ran into a bit of Wi-Fi trouble because I accidentally got a Realtek model, but I've long since fixed the issue entirely - I've posted the solution elsewhere here.

On another note, maybe we should just have a yearly hardware recommendations post pinned on this forum - it feels like we get a question like this every week or so and they sort of clutter the forum, no offense intended to OP.

Edit: Here's my Linux Hardware probe from when I first got the laptop https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=1e50fb1862