This past year I’ve been checking local listings for used cheap laptops because it’d be neat to have a small portable Linux machine.
It’s just surprisingly difficult to confirm what specs a given model has or to find reviews for it. The sellers don’t always do the best job listing the components and googling the model numbers may not give you too many results either. Some manufacturers keep reusing the same model name year after year so you have similarly named computers with wildly different guts, or often a specific model number will only give you very local and very limited results which makes me think some SKUs are only sold in a few countries for a short period of time
Buying phones is much more simple in this regard
depending on how cheap you want to go you can always get a used/refurbished Chromebook Plus model (they have 8GB of RAM and 128gb+ of storage and a Ryzen3/Intel i3, so not terrible) for $200 or less, and then dual-boot into a Linux distro or just flash the BIOS entirely. Took me maybe an hour to get Lubuntu installed on an old Chromebook 4 (the old 4gb RAM/32 GB models) and it runs great given it’s only got 2 cores. Great battery life but YMMV. There’s a script that automates the BIOS flashing, and there’s a pretty good walkthrough/explanation about getting it going on various models here: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/