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.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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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.
Chromebooks are locked down yes, but they do give you the keys. It involves unplugging the internal battery to be able to modify the hardware write protection, entering dev mode to disable the write protection, and then flashing a Coreboot port onto the firmware. Even then, a lot of basic things may or may not work once you're booted into Linux. From experience I don't recommend.
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
I bought a very cheap N100 laptop that worked perfectly with EndeavourOS. If you don't need a not of gaming prowess, or massive storage I recommend something modest. PM me and I will send you a link, I just don't want to junk up the forum but 16 inch screen, 16gb of ram and a 512gb ssd and it is perfectly respectable, though the touchpad isn't great it does work in Linux, I just think the design is a little too tight. I will agree that a lot of laptops work fine and you can "test" them with a USB stick instead of going through the full installation.