I tend to get middle of the line machines - and run Linux in a VM under VirtualBox or the likes. Works very well. You can run pretty much any Linux distributio

I tend to get middle of the line machines - and run Linux in a VM under VirtualBox or the likes. Works very well. You can run pretty much any Linux distribution you like. A lower cost machine means that you don't worry too much about upgrading. I've had decent experience with consumer grade Dell laptops. Just be sure to get a lot of RAM because you are going to dedicate some of it to the VM.