I’m using Dell laptop, they are still supported even the 6 or 7 years old one, with new bios fixing CVE, etc and some of them were even sold with Linux at the time!
I bought a E5470 (core I5 6th gen) I love it, less than 200$, 8GB of ram, 14" 1080p IPS, 256GB SSD. Full repair manual available, etc.
I’m running MX Linux on it
Yes, with Xfce it’s pretty snappy, works really well. The E5490 is even better especially with a i7