Ebay, T470, T480, T490. $200-300. Good laptops with great Linux compatibility. Cheap and reliable.

For your distro, Linux Mint. The stock, normal edition right on the website. Cinnamon desktop edition.

Simple and reliable, and very windows-like.

https://etcher.balena.io/ is good and simple software to create a bootable USB.

Use the Mint .iso as the file, burn to the USB stick of your choice.

Welcome to the club :)

Something thing to keep in mind when getting started is to manage your expectations. You've spent all this time using Windows so you already know where everything is -- for Windows. In a lot of respects you are going to be starting over from scratch, learning new ways to install software, get around the desktop, and doing simple things like changing your settings. Don't get discouraged, you've done this before, you can do it again.

One way to cope with the initial frustration is to start out loading up something like VirtualBox on your Windows desktop, and installing a linux distribution there. Then you can play around, take your time to find a desktop that's right for you, and learn how to actually DO things in linux that you already do daily in Windows. That way you eliminate the pressure of trying to figure out how to do everything at once.

Another reason to start with a virtual machine is that there are a LOT of possible linux distributions to choose from. There are also quite a number of different desktop environments to choose from. It pays to take a bit of time and play around with different options to find out what you like. You also need to decide if you want something running the cutting-edge releases, or if you prefer stability with slightly older software. For example, Ubuntu is a good choice for the absolute latest releases but can introduce bugs that the devs refuse to fix. On the other hand, Debian (which is actually the base system that Ubuntu is built on) only releases slightly older software that has been tested over the past few months. However in all cases, you will always get immediate patches for security issues.

As already mentioned, any old computer laying around is a viable candidate for Linux. Until last year I was running internet-facing web servers on 1GB of memory and a single core. If you have something built in the last 20 years it will work for your purposes. Hell my desktop is someone else's throw-away because under Windows they considered it "too slow to get email or browse the internet". I use it for writing arduino code and building models for my 3D printer.

I should add that I’ve been interested in getting a small, portable notebook for coding separate of this, and making it Linux seemed a good idea at the same time.

Linux mint, if there is any problem try popOS.

Also would recommend trying out the distros before you install them in a virtual machine since it's easier to try multiple distros without the hassle of setting them up. Since you are in windows at the moment, you probably should try virtualbox

Edit: ventoy is a pretty cool project for when you want to setup a pen with the installation isos to the baremetal.

If you want to go low budget and play around there's lots of SBCs that can run Linux. Check here for example : https://www.armbian.com There's also ones that come as light weight keyboard, for example the pi400 Easy to carry around and put into a HDMI monitor. A drawback is that when using ARM there is sometimes software which only runs on amd64 family though that does not happen very often. Other option is to look at refurbished laptops. If you skip the chromebook ones (Which can be cumbersome to run plain Linux on unless you want to play with Linux and Android on top of ChromeOS) you can find them for 90 Euros or more.

I'll add: Back up your data and have fun! :3

Your new best friend: https://linuxjourney.com

There will be lots that will make you feel lost, because of the design language differences and the widely different philosophy, but you got this. Just take it at your own pace, one web search at a time and you'll be grand!

Debian + Gnome. The debian wiki is full of great documentation. If you prefer watching, there's so many great (and not-so-great) courses on YouTube. I personally found tutoriaLinux's series helpful. Please understand that is merelyy what helped me at that point in my journey not necessarily the best tutorial series for you or anyone else.

My biggest tip is, regardless of the teacher or the lesson: follow along. Learn by doing, not by watching someone else doing. If you find yourself thinking anything like "couldn't I have done this" or "but what would happen if I changed this parameter": Do It. Try it out. Seee what happens.

Coincidentally, my second biggest tip is: use a test environment to do anything that you don't fully understand. Even if it's only a new folder with a bunch of empty files to practice file manipulation commands, it's way better than losing your important files. Anything that affects software configuration should be backed up first, anything that affects the OS should be tested in a VM

I recently bought a used LG Gram to install Arch on after a few years of not having Linux…so recently did similar research, albeit with more Linux knowledge. I do NOT recommend Arch as a first distro unless you are willing to put in time for troubleshooting. That said, looking up a model of laptop you are considering + Linux in a search engine can be valuable in determining how much ease you will have getting basic (trackpad, Bluetooth, webcam, WiFi) items working. I dabbled with a CD distro as a gateway to Linux and the “live disk” option is still the best way to experiment. Nowadays it is on a USB stick. This method allows you to play around without actually installing. Others here have already given good advice. If you go the USB stick route, do be careful with anything related to disk partitioning and formatting. I accidentally wiped my dad’s hard drive once when I was not being careful!

Hey for me it was the same. For Hardware you can use anything. The optimal is a full AMD build Or Intel AMD build but Nvidia could give you a headdic. For distros I recommend something Arch based like Manjaro or EndeavourOS. As DE I recommend Kde Plasma because out of the box it looks pretty much like Windows but is highly customizable.

I think I need to narrow some things down;

My current Windows PC isn’t what I’m looking for; it’s a big and powerful gaming laptop from a few years back. I’m looking for something light and portable, but with a full keyboard for coding.

Pricewise I’m looking for something around $350; if this is unreasonable let me know.

As I understand it, Steam Deck uses KDE, so I’d like to stick with that for now.

The beauty of Linux is that it'll run on almost anything. I recommend second-hand office desktops for your use-case, you might find a good deal and get peripherals with it. If you somehow manage to come across GPUs at your price bracket, avoid Nvidia; poor drivers, support, corporate hostility etc.

My first distro recommendation is going to be a bit different from the usual, purely based on my experiences with other popular go-to distros. I'd recommend you try Fedora KDE, Fedora is a wonderful distro that always makes you feel welcome. KDE is a lot less resource demanding than Gnome, and is the desktop that ships with the steam deck. Personally I don't like Gnome since it's a bit Fischer-Price my first DE for me, but I encourage you to try everything.

I'm using the Budgie DE by the way, it's a good middleground between Gnome and KDE. Fedora provides "Spins" for all major desktops.

If you're feeling brave I'd like to quickly mention a version of Fedora called Fedora Kionite, it's whats poorly named an "immutable" distro (Atomic is a better name but don't worry over that right now). Very basically these distros restrict access to the core, or base, system files; which massively improves security and reliability. I use Fedora Onyx which is immutable with the Budgie DE, Kionite is KDE. Immutability is very new in the pseudo-mainstream and very much in it's infancy, so it will annoy you at times if you choose this path. But it has massive benefits and, I think, is the future of the Linux desktop.

I'm assuming this is your absolute first adventure into the FOSS world, which I know is probably wrong since you're on Lemmy, but I'm also still going to mention you should use the Firefox web browser as you said you were doing JavaScript. Firefox is the absolute most popular browser on Linux and has amazing developer features.

We're all eager to help budding penguins on their journey, so feel free to message me directly anytime for support or make posts right here.

Thinkpad T480 is the last of the good Thinkpads and should be more than your Budget

Edit. Corrected typo.

But literally any PC that’s within your budget. OK maybe that’s not true, there might still be some crap WiFi cards out there with weird firmware that don’t support Linux very well. Find an older name-brand PC within your budget. Before buying it Google “[make and model] Linux WiFi” and see whether there’s tons of complaints about the WiFi. If not, go ahead and get it, put Ubuntu or Linux Mint on there, start banging out JavaScript projects, profit.

Linux mint is a really easy and simple starting point. Fedora and openSUSE tumbleweed are a tad more advanced but allow more selection on your desktop environment (mint uses cinnamon, while Fedora and SUSE have both KDE and Gnome options) and thus can potentially support things like variable refresh rate and, when it gets support from KDE later this year, HDR.

For peripherals, if it's razor or Logitech, it'll just work and have community apps made to configure them. I personally like Keychron's stuff so that's what I use and that's fully Linux compatible, it does require some setup to work though. HDR is unsupported for the time being, but variable refresh (gsync/freesync) is in the KDE Plasma desktop environment under Wayland. On the topic of Wayland, if you want to make use of this new display protocol you'll need an AMD graphics card, as NVIDIA has been slacking with their Linux drivers. NVIDIA is getting better but it's not stable enough on Wayland for the laymen. In the case of only having an NVIDIA, X11 works fine, but it's just missing some features.

Also you won't need JavaScript, 90% of what you do will be through the GUI (depending on the distro), especially once you're set up. I know Fedora needs to enable rpmFusion, NVIDIA repos if on NVIDIA, and install codecs for hardware accelerated playback. Mint doesn't have these issues for the most part, though you'll want to enable flatpak's and consider disabling snaps. Mint already includes a graphical installer for NVIDIA and includes the codecs needed for hardware accelerated playback

Thread too long so I won't read but I always recommend ZorinOS. The sole distro I donated to so far.