im looking for a laptop, and all the places im finding are sleazy as fuck or the usual suspects; newegg, amazon, walmart, bestbuy.
just want a solid machine to run xen on without giving too much of my money to billionaires. is that so hard?
I'm gonna say what you probably already know: don't go to Walmart or Bestbuy. Whatever they have, it's most likely not good
I second the comment recommending craigslist, you can usually find some very good Thinkpads being sold for 200 bucks by particulars, but of course you also gotta do some additional checking about the state of the product. Maybe some local electronics store in your area could have good laptops for sale? Finally, if you're very lucky you may find some company laptops being dumped on the street by whoever had to declare bankrupcy ; this is probably not that common, but a lot more common than one would think
Buy a used high-end thinkpad (few years old) on ebay for a few hundred bucks. Checkout the thinkpad wiki for specs and shit. Basically you'll get a much nicer computer with a much higher build quality and easily repairable parts for far less than buying a new shit tier laptop for like 400-600 at a department store.
Basically schools and businesses buy hundreds of thinkpads and some high end Dell models every 3 or 4 years for usually 1-2k each and then resell them when they upgrade for like 200-300. Best way to get one is to go to your local colleges tech auction and buy one, but getting one on ebay will only cost a bit more.
Throw a good Linux distro on it, new battery (thinkpad batteries are good and cheap), and maybe a 1tb nvme ssd and you'll have an amazing laptop for years. I bought a used x1c gen 3 for 150$ last year and put a 100$ 1tb nvme in it and ill probably be using this thing for the next 5-10 years.
Just gonna chime in and say second hand is great, you have to be VERY careful though, and will likely need a new battery with a lot of second hand electronics. I use my local micro center for a lot of computer needs