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A real laptop at about €400 to €600 is far better long term purchase than a Chromebook, which is a sort of crippled netbook. Many Dell and Lenovo models are fine for Linux (Dell supporting it on some since 1999).
It's the opposite extreme to buying a top of the range Macbook for Linux. Only buy a Chromebook to run Google's almost spywear crippled OS beta and only buy a Mac to run MacOs.
I actually also have an old XP Netbook running Mint 19.x, though it's an Atom which are physically limited to 2G RAM. However current 32 or 64 Linux will work reasonably on a 512 M RAM machine using Mate Desktop and a sensible theme.
I gave away an old model – an original netbook – with the really slow 4G flash that had been upgraded to faster Flash and XP. I'd upgraded it with the ribbon cable to CF adapter card and a 32G byte CF card, much faster.
I didn't see much performance difference with the lighter weight desktop managers.
The problem with old netbooks is the small screen resolution, often 600 pixels high. So setting screen DPI to 65, selecting font sizes and a suitable theme makes the windows smaller to fit on screen. Alt Space or some desktops Alt LeftMouse lets you move a window with title bar above the screen.
my main laptop is a Lenovo E460 1920 x 1080 screen running Linux only.
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