I've been happy with my Thinkpad T480s. Got kubuntu loaded on it right now. Bought it refurbished on ebay.
Linux
There’s not much below $500. Here’s what I could find:
Another option is to buy a Chromebook, or look for a second hand several generation old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X or Dell XPS Developer Edition. The latter is your best bet for not getting something underpowered, but also carries more risk of it breaking down sooner with no support possible. You might be able to find a first gen framework 13 second hand which can be fixed if something goes wrong, but it hasn’t been around so long that they are that cheap. Still someone might want to get rid of it and low ball it.
thank you for the recommendations. I'm fine with swapping OS's so even just compatible would work. The world seems awash in a million diffrrent laptops so it is a bit overwhelming!
I would search out a second hand or cheaper Lenovo ThinkPad or Dell (as previous poster said).
I just got a Framework and everything works out of the box in Fedora. Battery life sucks, though. I only get about 6.5 hours out of mine, but I also have the 55Wh battery and not the new 61Wh one. I'm planning on upgrading as soon as they make the battery upgrade available on the store, though 10% more isn't really going to be enough for me to say this thing has good battery life. There's allegedly a BIOS update in the works that's supposed to help with idle power draw, so I'll see how that shakes out, I guess.