Consider buying used/upcycled. With Linux you're in good hands: the older models tend to have better support. The T-series Thinkpads are excellent. They're rug

Consider buying used/upcycled. With Linux you're in good hands: the older models tend to have better support. The T-series Thinkpads are excellent. They're rugged and designed for falls, spills, and travelling. There are still manufacturers producing extended battery packs and chargers for them. They're designed to be upgraded and modified. Bonus: you'll save some silicon from reaching a landfill for a few more years. And they're cheap. If one bites the dust you can replicate your setup to a new one and get going again without breaking bank for another $2k. Unless you're planning on doing bleeding-edge real-time 3D graphics work, the likelihood that you need a big, expensive machine is pretty low. Depending on the software stack you intend to work on you might not even need that much RAM (though if you're doing stuff in bleeding edge C++, Rust, or Haskell I'd recommend >16GB).