Just a silly girl~
Thinkpads were basically made for Linux, depending on your Budget you can get a Thinkpad X220, X230, T420 or T430 for small money - perfectly usesble machines and Linux (my experience is CachyOS & Arch) work out of the box.
For a bigger budget i could recomment the T480, it’s still upgradeable.
And for a bigger budget i’d recommend a T14 GEN2
Mint.
Linux users tend to forget that using Konsole even once is overwhelming for even “seasoned PC users”
My roommate is a gamer, spends lots of time on PC´s and knows his shit. But he felt overwhelmed with the CachyOS Laptop i gifted him.
pirated games can be quite ethical :3
glad i could help! :)
i found my way around it, if you have issues where the wiki can’t help you feel free to message me!
I am no expert and can only tell from my own experience: i recently installed CachyOS with KDE, it is an Arch based distro, despite that I, a fresh linux user, think it is really accessible and it worked out of the box. Gaming is not really an issue for me, if issues arise i just check ProtonDB, but that´s really rare thanks to Lutris being pre-installed. You also benefit from the Arch Wiki which, in my opinion, has a REALLY good documentation of any question or issue you encounter with that operating system.
You have to get comfortable with the terminal though, but i think that applies to any linux distro (my only other distro experience is Mint 10 yrs ago)
unfortunately not, power wise it only lets you upgrade the RAM.
but those CPU´s are vastly superior to those 2nd and 3rd Gen i7´s you can put into a t420/t430
the german website https://thinkwiki.de/ has detailed information about possible upgrades of every model :)