No Stupid Questions

Laptops on the market go in and out of fashion like clothes, what will work best this season won't be the best option this time next year.

You're going to want a model with 16gb RAM. It will be enough to run programs like modern browsers, office programs like 365 or LibreOffice, certain creative softwares to some extent, and most older games.

AMD CPU and Graphics components are generally better for their price range, so a Ryzen i5 or i7 and a Radeon RX series would be ideal.

Storage is pretty important especially when using Linux distros because they can make use of Swap Partitions, which vastly expand the programs you're able to run, so you want about 1TB storage SSD. She probably won't use more but she also probably won't run out of space any time soon unless she's a world class photographer, a video editor, or an archivist.

So if we punch these into a search we find a couple options:

ASUS - Vivobook 16 16" FHD+ Laptop - AMD Ryzen 7 7730U with 16GB Memory - 1TB SSD - Indie Black on sale on Best Buy for $649

or a refurbished model:

Acer - Refurbished Excellent - Aspire Go 15 15.6" Touchscreen Laptop FHD AMD Ryzen 5 7520U 16GB 1TB SSD Radeon 610M AG15-21PT-R8TF for about $331.99

Note that the Ryzen 5 7520U came out in 2022 while the Ryzen 7 7730U came out in Q1 2023, so not much difference between the two in performance.

EDIT: You might also want to know how many USB ports you need, what type of port, if you need HDMI, if you need an SD Card port, etc. Most new laptops lack a disk drive, I think, as it adds too much vertical profile. They also might not fit in most bags such as a backpack if they're too big.

EDIT 2: ah, I see you added more info to the post, that will be helpful for future commenters.

I basically only buy used Lenovo T-Series 14" laptops now.

Anything else is a POS or overpriced.

Can you share more specs about which do you care, such as screen quality, memory amount, CPU/GPU max productivity, size of the device itself, etc? And also: in which country are you so that it will be possible to find model available in your place?

https://www.cyberport.de/notebook-und-tablet/notebooks/hp/pdp/1ca2-0aa/hp-probook-4-g1a-14-wuxga-ryzen-5-230-16gb-512gb-ssd-dos-cw6r1es-bto.html

You can probably find them at this price (650-700 EUR) across most major retailers in DE/AT.

We have deployed a bunch of these Probook 4-series G1 units, both Intel and AMD, they really punch above their weight class in build quality.

So much so that several of our business clients who historically always bought Elitebook 800-series and ThinkPad T-series for their fleets this generation decided to "downgrade" to Probook 4 and save a lot of money without noticeable loss in quality.

To quote our distributor: "HP really took their higher laptop classes behind a shed and shot them by upgrading the entry-level business class like this."

The most important thing is to make sure the CPU architecture is recent. Especially for AMD, as they tend to re-release very old chips under a new name, so be careful for those! Intel "14th gen" (e.g. Core Ultra 100 series) or AMD Zen 4 is ideal, but Intel 13th gen and AMD Zen 3 is alright for more basic tasks. Newer architectures (Zen 5, Intel Core 200 and 300 series) are probably out of your price range.

Next, you need to look at the CPU itself. An older chip with higher clock speeds will be better than a weaker new chip, though possibly less efficient. A 6-core model is fine for most use cases, but if they do any CPU intensive tasks, a higher tier 8 core might be needed (but is also quite a bit more expensive)

Nearly all the cheap laptops will have 1080p 60Hz LCDs, usually non-touch. For the flippy laptops, it will cost quite a bit more.

Avoid HP laptops, as they are poor value and tend to have worse build quality (+ HP is a terrible company, none of them are great but HP is one of the baddest eggs of the smelly bunch). Dell is a mixed bag due to the sheer number of models they have. Lenovo machines tend to be quite good from my experience (my sibling uses a cheap Lenovo laptop), with good to excellent keyboards. Asus is mixed too, they have pretty good value machines and usually awesome port selection, but their customer service is not great. Acer is usually more affordable than the competition but their build quality is lacking.

Honestly, if I were you, I would go on the used market to find a good deal there.

If you want to check whether the SSD and RAM is upgradeable, search the model number + "teardown".

And for the OS, go with Linux Mint, Fedora, or similar (any will do, since there will be no Nvidia dGPU issues). Windows will be slower, more privacy-invasive, annoying to use, I'm sure you get the picture.