Linux

maybe search for system76 too. I found one on my local craigslist.

Dell latitude 14 inch 5430 or similar, cheap ish. Its got all the wants and needs. Plenty of ports. Its dell so it'll survive forever.

Considering your budget of 200 GBP / 250USD, I would recommend laptops meant for school. There are plenty of refurbished laptops out there with a decent battery condition and overall state for sale around €100. Most of these machines aren't more powerful than most entry level Chromebooks and often have a Pentium or Celeron CPU, but that's a tradeoff you'll have to make. Another advantage is that they usually come with a touch screen and decent display, which is nice if you're out and about.

Keep browsing eBay and HotUKDeals. You can easily find something really good for <£200.

This 11th Gen Intel Dell laptop was going to £150 this morning and I was on the verge of ordering it and adding more RAM.

This sub is obsessed with Thinkpads, but when you're looking for a secondhand bargain then you pick up what comes opportunistically. The market is flooded with Dells because businesses change machines long before they go out of date and generally keep them in very very good condition.

Thinkpad Thinkpad T480. Can find many within your price range. Great quality, most of it is replaceable including keyboard and display. Aside from actual hardware failure or damage, the one thing that gets hit long term with laptops, the battery, is super easy to replace and there is both an internal and external if you want really long life

I'm not sure how common they are outside Japan, but I have a little (about 12" I think) Panasonic "Let's Note" that I use quite a lot as a lightweight coding (and retro/indie gaming :D) device that I can throw in even my smallest bag when there's a chance I'll have to kill more than a few minutes. They're designed to be a little bit rugged. I had Ubuntu on it previously, now Mint, and the only problem I've had is that Linux somehow sees two screen brightness systems, and by default it connects the screen brightness keys to the wrong (i.e. nonexistent) one. Once I traced the problem it was a quick and painless fix.

They seem to be sold worldwide, so you may be able to get one cheaply second-hand. One thing to be careful about is the fact that in order to keep the physical size down, the RAM is soldered to the board. Mine is an older model (5th gen iCore), and has 4GB soldered on but also one SODIMM slot, so I was able to upgrade to 12GB total. But I've noticed that on most later models they got rid of the RAM slots entirely, so whatever RAM it comes with is what you're stuck with.

small tuxedo computer

Thinkpad x1 carbon gen 6, or if you're willing to up your budget a bit, a x13 is also a great fit.

Just popped Arch on a Thinkpad Carbon X1 gen8. There about 300 on eBay. Great decision

I use Arch btw

Used DELL 5310. Intel 10th-gen, 60Whr battery (goes 8+ working hours on a charge) often 16GB RAM and at least a 256GB SSD at that price range. Upgradeable (DDR4, NVMe) too.

I'm in the UK, and I've had decent laptops from rapidIT and ITZoo, both .co.uk as far as I remember. I can't remember which laptop I got from Rapid as it was a few years ago, but the first one had a faulty motherboard, and they swapped the laptop with no issues.

I had a Stonebook branded Clevo N750BU from ITZoo, which is an i7 based laptop, and Mint works perfectly on it. It's quite old now, so you'll probably get a newer one for your budget, but with a RAM upgrade it runs everything I throw at it. I use it for designing and editing logos in Inkscape and Krita, and for editing a website in html, css, and javascript, so anything newer should do it even better :)

I'm loving the new Snapdragon laptops, especially if you don't have any heavy (read: gaming) workloads!

Not sure if it's available where you're located, but did find this listing. https://a.co/d/bztqux3

If you're going to hang out in coffeeshops just get whatever has a clearly visible Apple logo and spend the rest of your money on a beanie, airpods and fake glasses.

A Chromebook?