Welcome to Linux! Every hardware runs everything. Its not Mac or Android. Old Devices work always, as the drivers already exist. Only reeeally old stuff gets thrown out of the kernel.
Thinkpad T430’s have a pretty high price on Ebay currently, I have one and its a great laptop, nice keyboard, Coreboot/Heads/Libreboot/1vyrain custom BIOS all run. But it is a really old Laptop.
Bought a Clevo MZ41 on Ebay, will attempt to flash coreboot. Was not pricey too.
Try Thinkpads, Dell, Hp. Normally older Acer or Asus too. If you find a laptop with
good 1080p display
good keyboard in your language/ you dont care about stickers
good battery life
everything normal broken, not completely old
Just search for “Linux MODEL” and you will probably find some reports.
For new hardware you want a recent Distro, Fedora (try Kinoite! ublue.it), OpenSuse Tumbleweed (try Kalpa) or EndeavorOS for easy Arch, are all good. Maybe avoid ubuntu, or use something like PopOS or TuxedoOS, which are better versions of Ubuntu, with newer packages and less annoying crap like Snap.
I am not sure if you already use Linux, but some general tips:
try to use Flatpaks from Flathub as much as possible. They are already often officially supported and have less bugs. Also the apps are isolated from your system, so they are more up to date, dont break your system, keep system upgrades small, and they have privacy advantages
use a Distro that supports Wayland very well. X11 is stupidly old and will be completely unsupported in a few years. Its already dead since a few years, as nothing changes.
try an “immutable”, image based Distribution like Fedora Atomic (Kinoite (KDE), Silverblue (Gnome)) or Opensuse Kalpa (KDE) or Aeon (Gnome). They are simply modern, stable, resettable and your changes are transparent.
if you want to do any crazy stuff like code, install apps with many dependencies, do it in a Distrobox. You can install apps normally, but they are still not bloating your system. If you dont need them, delete the Distrobox and your system is clean again. This goes especially for strange University etc. software that needs to be installed with some script or something.
use a root Distrobox if you need things like USB
use fish as your normal shell, simply by editing the Terminals “open command”. That way your shell in the Distroboxes has a different configuration, fish looks nice and colorful and has stuff like autocompletion.
do backups of your system and your data. Just do that always, on an extra drive. It saves so much horror of losing everything, if a drive breaks or your laptop gets stolen or whatever. If you want Cloud backups, use Cryptomator and any cloud you want.
use Syncthing, maybe disable global discovery for LAN only, for syncing your data between two or more specific devices.
use soundbound, SoundCloud Downloader (Firefox Addon) and youtube downloaders as long as they work. Download all of your music to not be dependend on those companies
try waydroid for Android apps on Linux. Use F-Droid basic as the application store, and check for “list of f-droid repositories” and add some.