skribe

My daily driver is a 10yo Dell business laptop. Before that I ran a similarly aged Lenovo. I run mint.

In my experience, the amount of ram and an SSD are the biggest contributors to how good the performance feels. Running mint on 4G is possible, but performance is comprised. 8G is perfectly fine most of the time. 16G (my current setup) is peachy keen. I’m astounded what I can do in blender on a 10yo machine.

That said, if you can afford one (and they operate in your country - they don’t here), then grab a framework, like others have said. If that’s not an option, then add some ram and an SSD.

My 2c.

Nextcloud.

It depends, but probably. I use 5-10yo laptops running Debian.

Google’s device, not yours. You don’t own it unless you have sole root privileges.