I bought a ThinkPad T495s despite some of their warts because the Linux compatibility is generally good, and they can be found for cheap secondhand. Battery life is not great, but it's powerful enough for coding and spinning up test k8s clusters. I used to have an X1 Carbon 9th-Gen, but the thermals were so bad it would throttle after only 2 minutes under load. I could get a MacBook Pro and have a smoother experience, but the advantge of secondhand is that I don't care about the hardware. It gets destroyed who cares, just buy another one.