As I'm a just your average home user of Linux these days, I'm not testing out the latest & greatest distros or getting under the hood much and mostly just use my computer as a web browser, I might be wrong about this but it seems like these days most any laptop will play nice w. any currently supported Linux distro.
Especially, if like me, you're not running a bleeding edge distro like Debian on older hardware. I'd suggest taking a look at what Free Geek has to offer, https://www.ebay.com/str/freegeekportland , especially if you don't need modern, high-end hardware. You'd be supporting a local organization that does good work in the community & you'd get local support not just from Free Geek but I'm sure there are many folks on PLUG, including myself that run Linux on older HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc hardware.
