chromebooks are often well built with good keyboards at prices monumentally lower than comporable laptops, whilst being powerful enough to run linux well

you can quite easily get linux on almost all chromebooks, even arm ones (mrchromebox and postmarketos are references to look into for that) (postmarketos for arm stuff)

I have an hp chromebook g7 that I paid less than 20 dollars for, which has a good keyboard and is performant enough for firefox and typing on swaywm. it’s worth so little and is so light that it can just live in my backpack without worry. it’s also able to be charged from a normal usb c phone charger, supports usb c display output, and has a low power celeron that absolutely sips power

you can get much nicer chromebooks for cheap too if you’re into that, including some with unibody aluminum chassis and high resolution ips displays, all at prices less than even bottom barrel pc laptops

commenter was suggesting that framework allows you to “grow with your budget”

i don’t think this is exactly true in most situations

not rlly wanting to reply to everyone but framework mainboards are price comparable to equivalent entire laptops

i literally want a framework laptop, but selling it to people as a good way to save money isn’t really viable in my opinion

not to be a downer but you could very likely buy a higher performing laptop than even the top framework laptop for less money than even a minimal build

considering that the intended use case is for research, the web is going to be used either way, so it’s better to not have the distraction of a full web browser, which is exactly what “distraction free” is all about

the play services are not installed by default*

Know that you’ll probably hate what you try first. Personally I say you shouldn’t use Pop_OS!, but its better than being scared of making a wrong choice. “distrohopping” is a great way to learn.

tldr: just do it

So you chose tencent?

yes this is oversimplified blah blah