For the past twenty years I've bought thinkpads which during productive time have generally run (a) Firefox (b) some sort of system that lets me get full screen X11+xterm+ssh to do the actual work on remote development servers.

I've gone through VMs, colinux, cygwin, and currently WSL2+VcXsrv for (b) and so far it's basically worked out fine.

(I'm aware that desktop linux wrangling is far, far easier than it used to be but this setup very rarely annoys me and if I'm going to do some recreational geekery on a "because I can" basis it's far more likely to be something like playing with a new programming language than reinstalling my laptop)