I'm looking for a new laptop, suddenly, which involves a lot of time with elaborate search criteria on Ebay/Craigslist, and visits to PassMark's CPU benchmark so frequent that I made a URL-bar shortcut for the site.

From my experience of previous laptops, this is what I'm looking for, and why:

Main criteria:

1. Good Linux support. I don't want to have to drag my developer laptop into the world of open source kicking and screaming. My experience so far: ThinkPads good, Macbooks bad, everything else mediocre.
   1. This constraint narrows the field down to Lenovo ThinkPads, Dell XPS Developer Edition, Framework Laptops, and Linux-first startups and resellers such as System76, StarLabs, Slimbook, and Tuxedo.
2. Durable and repairable. Old ThinkPads are my benchmark. I have had to repair every laptop I have owned, myself, and I want it to be nice. I use my laptop hard, and travel a lot.
3. High enough spec to run SOTA local models. For me, this means ~64gb–128gb RAM, a late model gaming-grade GPU, and a CPU faster than what I had (Ryzen 7, ~20k CPU bench). <14B models don't cut it. I'd like to be able to run 70B. And I have spent a lot of time trying to jam overlarge models into limited RAM/VRAM, and determined that it's a waste of time.

Secondary criteria:

1. 15+ inch screen. I've mostly used 13–14 inch laptops, and I find they're too small to feel fully productive.
2. Loaded to the gills with RAM and SSD storage, since they're getting more expensive. I want my next laptop to have as much RAM and storage as I'm going to need from day one (2TB+ storage, and ~64gb+ RAM).
3. Cheap. Did I mention that I wanted my insanely powerful dream computer to be dirt cheap? There's no way to get these specs objectively cheap, but patience, bargain hunting, and sacrificing on cosmetics can get you part-way there, and close the gap between purchase price and resale value.
4. Not a gaming laptop. My last laptop was a gaming laptop, because that was the tradeoff for getting good specs at a good price. But I find gaming laptops ugly, and less care seems to go into the design and build quality, since they go obsolete so quickly. Since my gaming laptop broke after two years of use, I'm not getting another gaming laptop.
5. RJ45 Ethernet Jack + 3.5mm headphone jack. I don't want to have to use a USBC hub for things I use every day.

Nice to have:

• A 4k screen — but I'll settle for a good non 4k screen. (To go back to my old saw, the screen on T14s and Dell XPS are way better than the screen on my gaming laptop. The screen on my Asus G14 sucked.)
• Ability to drive multiple external 4k monitors — but I'd settle for 1.
• Easily-swappable harddrive + battery + RAM (old ThinkPads totally spoiled me)
• Coreboot
• Good battery life
• (Open)BSD support
• Non-janky keyboard and trackpad
• Lots of USB C + USB A ports
• A keyboard drain :)

So what options are there that match these criteria? The ones that come to mind are:

• The Framework 16 (expensive for the specs, but pretty much perfect otherwise)
• ThinkPad T15, T16, or X1 carbon ← probably the sweet spot
• Various of the (generally hard-to-find-used) StarLabs and System76 workstations

I'm hope I'm missing some good options. If I am, let me know! I'm also curious, if you have vaguely similar criteria: what things are worth sacrificing, in order to prioritize more important things?

My strategy so far has been to buy dinged-up junkers, used, and then fix them. And to do my research, and then wait, and wait, and wait. If I billed for the time I spend trying to save money, I would be a rich man.