I was looking into buying a used or refurbished laptop and installing a Linux distro on it. Mostly want to use it for surfing the web, but I am sure it will have a lot of other uses. What are some good sites to buy a laptop? What should I consider as far as the type of hardware goes (Gpu, WiFi, etc)? What would be good distros to consider? I have been working with Linux for a long time, so I would not consider myself a beginner. Thanks for any advice.
Avoid any machine with an Nvidia graphics card for Linux. It’s more hassle than it’s worth. Source: my experience.
However, I have good luck with most laptops that have Intel integrated graphics. Specifically Lenovo machines. I am not exactly sure what budget you have, but you can get a second hand Lenovo machine that would work quite well.
If you don’t care about it being fully open source/libre, then from my experience you likely won’t have much issue with Wifi either.
As far as what you are wanting to use it for, you could get away with something fairly low powered. Depending on your preferences, I would suggest a number of distros for that purpose:
Fedora, it’s been a good distro in my experience. They offer different spins of it with different desktop environments. I personally love KDE, but you could go with Gnome too.
As far as hardware goes, if you are unsure about a machine being usable with linux, I would check here: https://linux-hardware.org/
Hope this helps!