The biggest drawback is that you have to rely that the manufacturer is ethical and isn't loading your shit with bloatware/spyware, which, lol. I suppose one benefit is that, theoretically, they can spend more time and resources on designing a laptop instead of licenses for windows, but I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft eats up market share by providing their OS for free for PC manufacturers. Is that still true?
I'm not currently looking for one, but I am curious about them. For my use case, it would be mostly light programming, web browsing, movies and videos, photo editing, and light gaming. Doesn't make sense for me to shell out $1000 for some spyware linux junk when I could just buy some used 2015 windows laptop and install a distro on it
Counterpoint: Buy preinstalled Linux laptop and just install Linux on there yourself.
Save for video cards, I've not had any issue of compatibility between Linux and hardware for over ten years. I'd be amazed if any other hardware >year old isn't well supported by all main distros. If your use case isn't CPU-intensive, then absolutely just buy older hardware and smash Linux on there.
And PC manufacturers get varied levels of discount on Microsoft OS, usually between 40-90% (You can buy OEM versions yourself for ~half price, bigger discounts tend to be volume licensing). I've never heard of them getting it for free.
Enjoying this dialectical synthesis