My daily driver right now is a mid-tier Tiger Lake board. You can get the equivalent for sub-$300 on Amazon. The client doesn't need to do much in the modern developer flow, running a browser, an X server and an ssh client is 90% of anything that needs to happen, with the occasional Linux Wayland client from the VM thrown in (Thunderbird for personal mail, occasional use of Audacity, stuff like that).

In most cases HP

I have a couple of Samsungs and a Pixelbook. You can BYOD with Chromebooks, too, so you can pick smaller, lighter ones or ones with bigger screens than the standard offerings if you’re willing to pay for it.