Considering your budget of 200 GBP / 250USD, I would recommend laptops meant for school. There are plenty of refurbished laptops out there with a decent battery condition and overall state for sale around €100. Most of these machines aren't more powerful than most entry level Chromebooks and often have a Pentium or Celeron CPU, but that's a tradeoff you'll have to make. Another advantage is that they usually come with a touch screen and decent display, which is nice if you're out and about.

I got myself an old EEE PC for exactly that purpose. (Except, substitute python with lua).

8h battery life, cost me €20 and does what it's supposed to. Just make sure you get one with an Atom N280 or better. The popular N270 is 32bit only, and more and more programs are dropping 32bit support. Some of them you can DIY compile for 32bit, some you really don't want to.

(For example, compiling Node on an Atom N270 takes around 3 days.)

I had one with an N270 first and replaced it with one with an N450 to get 64bit.

Maxed it out with 2GB RAM, a cheapo €10 SSD that maxes out SATA and overclocked it to 2GHz.

It's not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but it's totally ok for editing text files with Kate and compiling with platformio.

I'm in the UK, and I've had decent laptops from rapidIT and ITZoo, both .co.uk as far as I remember. I can't remember which laptop I got from Rapid as it was a few years ago, but the first one had a faulty motherboard, and they swapped the laptop with no issues.

I had a Stonebook branded Clevo N750BU from ITZoo, which is an i7 based laptop, and Mint works perfectly on it. It's quite old now, so you'll probably get a newer one for your budget, but with a RAM upgrade it runs everything I throw at it. I use it for designing and editing logos in Inkscape and Krita, and for editing a website in html, css, and javascript, so anything newer should do it even better :)

Try Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5.

Used DELL 5310. Intel 10th-gen, 60Whr battery (goes 8+ working hours on a charge) often 16GB RAM and at least a 256GB SSD at that price range. Upgradeable (DDR4, NVMe) too.

Instead of just throwing random preferences out there, I'll help clarify the field of comments:

1. Thinkpads USED to be a safe choice, but Lenovo has been tainting that model line for a few years. Search and find specific models, and don't just buy because it has the Thinkpad brand.
2. Framework is 100% ready to go. They have a Refurb store where everything is cheap, but if you find one cheaper, get it.
3. Dell had a ton of Linux ready laptops under the XPS brand not long ago. Search and find out which to make sure, but they shipped with Linux installed.
4. I hate to say it, but HP Probooks were solid and shipped with Linux also. Terrible company, but they make decent enterprise products. They'll sell for cheap on eBay.

Refurbished Thinkpad. The answer is always refurbished Thinkpad.

People are going to say Thinkpad but I am going to say 2013 to 2017 MacBook Air. Inexpensive. Light. Good looking. A joy to use. Faster than you think. And well supported under Linux (I use EndeavourOS on them myself).

A refurbished Thinkpad T480.

I have recently bought 2 dirt cheap thinkpads, one for me and one for the wife.

T490s - i5 intel
T14s - Ryzen 5 AMD

Both are tick all your requirements except for the numbpad, the T14s is definitely worth the extra money, though. It can even handle some medium gaming.
Both have upgradeable nvme ssds. However the ram is soldered on the "s" versions of these laptops so find one with 16gb or more.

loving my recently acquired T480. not the fastest by any means, but solid and great keyboard. plus non-soldered memory allows for upgrades. got mine off craigslist for 120, a steal.

The generic answer for this is to get a refurbished thinkpad. Pretty much any T-series fit your needs and there's plenty of pre-leased corporate machines around which are refurbished and often have even a some kind of warranty.

Keep browsing eBay and HotUKDeals. You can easily find something really good for <£200.

This 11th Gen Intel Dell laptop was going to £150 this morning and I was on the verge of ordering it and adding more RAM.

This sub is obsessed with Thinkpads, but when you're looking for a secondhand bargain then you pick up what comes opportunistically. The market is flooded with Dells because businesses change machines long before they go out of date and generally keep them in very very good condition.

I've had great results with various refurbished Dell Latitudes from eBay over the years. I have a stack of about 5 or 6 of 'em and they've all run many mainstream Linux distros with fantastic out-of-the-box support. I pass 'em out to members of the household whenever a laptop is needed and they'll usually get the job done.

I'd just type in "Dell Latitude" on eBay and filter by price and such. I suspect any model with an i5 and 8GB RAM oughta be fine for light programming work. I've found sellers with high ratings (like 97% or higher) and thousands of sales are pretty reliable (and tend to have return policies in case you get a lemon). Just test all the hardware (webcam, microphone, headphone jack, USB ports, ethernet, etc) as soon as you get it.

I've saved a lot of money over the years buying secondhand, and these machines have been running without a hiccup for years of casual use.

If you're in the US, refurbished thinkpads are probably the best option. Not so much here in Australia (but you mentioned GBP so perhaps you're in UK). Whatever. I bought a refurb Dell Latitude 3120 for AU$229

mfg yr 2021 Intel(R) Pentium(R) Silver N6000 @ 1.10GHz 8Gb RAM Intel UHD graphics Intel Wi-Fi 5 9560 (160 MHz) Bluetooth 5.0 Display: 1366 x 768 11.6" touchscreen 2-in-1 Disc: M.2 256Gb PCIe NVME Class 35 SSD 1.35kg

Runs voidlinux like it was born to it. It's my travel laptop.

t480 or t470

Dell latitude 14 inch 5430 or similar, cheap ish. Its got all the wants and needs. Plenty of ports. Its dell so it'll survive forever.

A refurb!

If you're able to code from a terminal, and care about longer battery life (my main concern when working from a coffee shop or elsewhere), I'd recommend getting a used android tablet, pry something from xiaomi or oneplus. You can find a decent model used for around that price with > 8 hour battery life easily.

Get a good stand, a solid bluetooth keyboard (logitech makes some great portable ones), and put termux on it (can probably handle light python locally).

If you need it to do CPU powerful tasks, use termux to remote into a VPS or your home server, and let a plugged in linux machine do the work so you can save your device's battery life. This is how I code at least.

I'm not sure how common they are outside Japan, but I have a little (about 12" I think) Panasonic "Let's Note" that I use quite a lot as a lightweight coding (and retro/indie gaming :D) device that I can throw in even my smallest bag when there's a chance I'll have to kill more than a few minutes. They're designed to be a little bit rugged. I had Ubuntu on it previously, now Mint, and the only problem I've had is that Linux somehow sees two screen brightness systems, and by default it connects the screen brightness keys to the wrong (i.e. nonexistent) one. Once I traced the problem it was a quick and painless fix.

They seem to be sold worldwide, so you may be able to get one cheaply second-hand. One thing to be careful about is the fact that in order to keep the physical size down, the RAM is soldered to the board. Mine is an older model (5th gen iCore), and has 4GB soldered on but also one SODIMM slot, so I was able to upgrade to 12GB total. But I've noticed that on most later models they got rid of the RAM slots entirely, so whatever RAM it comes with is what you're stuck with.

A light Chromebook?

Under 140, latitude 5290 (from 2018, 8350u). I bought it ~2y ago. Small, 12 inch, decent keyboard, very upgradable, decent build quality, but the LCD is horrendous. Edit: used, could probably be found under 100€.

maybe search for system76 too. I found one on my local craigslist.

small tuxedo computer

Don’t know where you are from, but I got a MacBook Pro 2015 for 150 and it can be forced to the latest macOS or just any distro of your liking. I will say that it can get quite hot and it’s recommended to switch the cooling paste and clean the fan.

For a cheap device it works fine and in this price bracket a better screen is barely possible.

I do have a surface book 2 that I will sell between 150 and 200, but I think Linux support is finicky at best. I ran popos on it, but there are just a bunch of things which would work a lot better on other devices

Thinkpad Thinkpad T480. Can find many within your price range. Great quality, most of it is replaceable including keyboard and display. Aside from actual hardware failure or damage, the one thing that gets hit long term with laptops, the battery, is super easy to replace and there is both an internal and external if you want really long life

If you're going to hang out in coffeeshops just get whatever has a clearly visible Apple logo and spend the rest of your money on a beanie, airpods and fake glasses.

intel macbook air works good for me, with debian and xfce

Just popped Arch on a Thinkpad Carbon X1 gen8. There about 300 on eBay. Great decision

I use Arch btw

A Chromebook?

I'm loving the new Snapdragon laptops, especially if you don't have any heavy (read: gaming) workloads!

Not sure if it's available where you're located, but did find this listing. https://a.co/d/bztqux3