“Not as shit as you could be” is not something we should be praising. A handful of years is still too short, just because it is marginally better than their competitors doesn’t mean we should give Apple a pass. It just means that the industry is full of shitty companies that profit off of producing e-waste, and know that consumers have no real choice but to put up with it.

A “factory seconds” framework 13 might fit your budget, and you get a laptop that is easily repairable and upgradeable. The 11th gen i7 version that starts at $500 is what I have been using for a couple of years now and still runs great.

They also have refurbished laptops, but those seem to start a little bit more expensive.

You could try this

From the btrfs page on the archwiki

General linux userspace tools such as df(1) will inaccurately report free space on a Btrfs partition. It is recommended to use btrfs filesystem usage to query Btrfs partitions.

apt search KEYWORD

Or

dnf search KEYWORD

Or

pacman -Ss KEYWORD

You don’t even need any hardware to get started. Fire up a virtual machine in VirtualBox or VMWare or use WSL. Start playing around, find a distro/DE you like and start learning.

After some time, look into dual booting your existing machine. You can try this in a virtual machine first before making any changes to you hardware.

Warm white LEDs inside of coloured glass bulbs to make LED Christmas lights that don’t look like gamer vomit.

I ran Lineage on my OnePlus 5 for a few years until I replaced it with a Pixel 8 last month. The first thing I did with it was install GrapheneOS. I have not had any issues so far.

Cyanogenmod became LineageOS. It can be run fully de-googled or with Gapps.

GrapheneOS is also worth looking at.

Both run on modern hardware and are super simple to install.