Laptop

There are two parts to choosing a good laptop: hardware and software.

Hardware

Although there are many different manufacturers of laptops there are really only two hardware platforms available. These are X86-64 and Arm.

X86-64 is a 64 bit architecture predominantly made by Intel and AMD. It is most commonly used in laptops, desktops, and servers. The author favours AMD where possible.

ARM is a family of architectures that are licensed by ARM to manufacturers. It is most commonly found in telephones and laptops, though can also be found in servers.

Both platforms are very capable and will offer sufficient computational oomph for most tasks.

In general any second-hand laptop newer than ten years old will be powerful enough for light browsing, office work, and communications. Backmarket is reliable.

Software

There are many compute operating systems available but only one is free, privacy respecting, and has sufficient hardware support to run on almost anything: GNU Linux. Other excellent alternatives are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There are many different varieties of Linux, known as distributions. Linux Mint is commonly recommended.