I've often found that simply buying an older model of a relatively popular brand is more than enough to get a working combo. My go-to is Lenovo, and sticking t

I've often found that simply buying an older model of a relatively popular brand is more than enough to get a working combo. My go-to is Lenovo, and sticking to the Thinkpad line. Occasionally I've had some growing pains, but I've found using a model that's at least 12-18 months old is more than sufficient for patches to have made it upstream. Obviously if you have some specific need for a rather new model, then going for something like the Dell XPS line or some other "Linux Certified" line is a better plan. But for my needs, anything within the last 6 years will likely be good enough in my book. I tend to kick intensive jobs off to my local server or set up a one-off in the cloud.