Came to second this. I have an old hp Chromebook that is indestructible, has insane battery life, and still has a few years of updates left. The built in Linux terminal is fine and just about anything you can get through apt-get, dpkg, or otherwise works fine as well (if there is an arm version), it’ll even add menu entries for GUI apps.
I do light reading or dev work on it, and use the built in terminal to keep track of and ssh into my remote boxes. I take it on the road to take notes or hop on a wifi.
When I first got it the interface was kinda crap for a laptop, but through the updates (dark mode, new menu, etc) it’s actually just fine now.
It’s slow, low ram and only usable for a few tabs at a time, but for what I use it for it does fine, and it was cheap enough I won’t cry if it dies.
I’ve been coding around 25 years and got my start in perl. I absolutely hated python when I first used it. I use it all the time now. I still prefer my curly braces but I don’t have any trouble with python or mind the whitespace anymore. I just run it through ruff every save. I do the same with go everything goes through gofumpt. I really think a lot of it is a generational thing. Older people are just used to curly brackets.
I do get peoples complaints about the packaging. Unless you’re a dev already it’s a bit extra to deal with shuffling virtual environments because the system python environments almost never work out of the box, at least in the last few distros I’ve used. Once I adjusted though it’s no problem. I run half my dev stuff in toolboxes with their own environment anyway.