For most of 2024, my main daily driver laptop was a little pink chinese laptop from 2019 I bought on amazon for roughly $200. It was marketed toward communication students. I put arch with cinnamon on it and it was pretty damn adequate for my needs, serviceable for browsing, watching videos, and even some dinky games, and of course fine for development, able to run tiny prototype code locally and ssh into more powerful servers (or cloud vms, whatever) when work was to be done for people paying for the compute

You really don't need that much computer for most things, but most operating systems shove a lot of extras on there by default. Leaving windows on the thing obviously would have been untenable, but even ubuntu would probably chug on such a device. I think if the supply crunch continues this logic will make sense to more and more people

I use a macbook for work now because I'm required to. It's just at every level an obnoxious operating system to work with, its permission model is a mess, every program on it is an ad and keeps trying to vie for my attention and I can't remove half of them. It bugs out often, including maxing out its application memory opening programs I didn't ask to open. It updates itself in an obnoxious way without my permission. It would be unusable if it didn't have a unix shell, and not everything on it is accessible from shell commands. Apple makes fundamentally incredible hardware, even if they're not perfect, but I would never intentionally buy something from them that didn't support getting out of their godawful software ecosystem