I’m looking to buy a laptop, which could be new or refurbished. I have only bought a laptop once previously, a Dell, as I have usually, in my various places I work from, used older donated machines with versions of Debian; Linux makes such a good job of keeping older laptops going, I find.
The laptop I’m looking for would need the following characteristics:
Reasonably compact, as will sometimes be carried in a small pannier or rucksack
15ʺ inch screen would be great, if it doesn’t automatically make the thing too bulky
While I do lots of Zoom work and similar, doesn’t necessarily need a built-in camera, as I already have a good USB one (but I guess all laptops have them by default?)
Speaker sound quality not important, as I would always plug headphones/headset in to listen to anything, including Zoom calls etc
Speed and video capability would need to be sufficient for video calls, but I don’t do any video streaming, generally, only audio
HDD/SDD capacity doesn’t need to be huge, as most stuff on cloud storage
I would be putting the latest stable version of Debian on it, so bundled operating system irrelevant to me (can’t imagine any machines come with the latest Debian installed?) but can I do a clean install on any laptop, or do some make this hard, if the manufacturers just assume Windoze or Google is just what you want? How much does the bundled software inflate the price, as I would resent having to pay for Windoze!?
My budget is around £500
