

I would personally get a second hand cheap laptop off ebay or a local 2nd hand electronics store, and then just install the distro of your choice on it. Can’t really think of an instance where a computer would come with an OS and I’d just use it as-is rather than installing my own, but I guess if you want a fairly generic eg Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mint, etc setup then it could work. But definitely don’t limit yourself to preinstalled laptops, since installing an OS only takes an afternoon if you pick an OS with a more fine-grained install like Arch or Gentoo, and about the same time as installing user software for distros that have more streamlined installs.
Yeah it depends. For “What’s the best laptop for Linux”, literally just look it up; there’s hundreds of articles, forum threads, Lemmy/Reddit posts, etc discussing this topic. But I don’t think there’s an issue asking for hardware recs if you are explaining a specific use-case. I would say still do an online search first—like some use-cases are quite general, e.g. for music production, for gaming, and so on. And even for the most general cases, I think if your thread is more something like “does anyone else disagree that ThinkPads are good for Linux?” that’s also fine, because it’s actually sharing your opinion and giving something more to go off of than “give me a laptop”.