Lifelong Mac user here, enjoyed the thread on what distros other hexbears use. I'm looking to preserve privacy a bit more by moving away from a walled garden. I'd like to move to using a linux distro at home, but am curious about the hardware to use. (Should add here that I'm a software engineer...my code isn't that hardware intensive but I mean I have to run an IDE so that can burn a lot of cycles.) Something I really like about AppleSi is the battery life + performance...it feels really unappealing to buy a clunky intel or amd laptop and get worse battery life. Any suggestions for hardware to look for? (I'd prefer to buy something second hand.)
Companies like RedHat buy Thinkpads (the professional ones like T-series and whatever the others are called, not the cheapo consumer ones) to run Linux on. So they're better supported because Linux devs also use them. And you can get used ones cheap because lots of companies buy these and sell them second hand after a couple of years. They're sturdy and usually in decent shape still.
Battery life is what it is. I'd get something with integrated graphics, that'll be better for battery life and out of the box support.
Do check on the internet if other people are having problems with the specific laptop you consider buying. There's always a chance that something is broken with any specific model.