There might be a slight point here, but speaking for me its all about not giving even more data (power) to "the few", that clearly do not wield that data in our interest.
For everyone living near nothern DE thinking about the transition to the cozy diesel engine http://www.maschinenmuseum-kiel-wik.de runs their submarine diesel engine every 3rd sunday. Spoiler: Loud gets redefined & not especially cozy.
This exactly, but let me add: Develop an urge to understand things. One needs to understand the whole system environment just to be able to make good choices.
To give "urge" more meaning: These days I get a noticeable weird feeling in my gut if I'm working in a environment where there are too many unknowns.
Which Notebook is a "good" linux machine? All my "linux on NB" experiences so far have been kind of compromised with lack or quality of drivers - resulting in poor overall performance. E.g.: no/poor/intermittend wifi/BT, excessive battery drain, loud fans.
Anything that's a pre-Skylake CPU with intel GPU shouldn't suffer from these issues. Skylake has been kinda a nightmare for power management and discrete GPU's (nvidia/amd) are a mixed bag, would avoid for a notebook.
It's been a long time since I hit a <10 year old model with wifi issues aside from crappy broadcom (in my mbp) that still works fine just occasionally needs patching. Intel, atheros, ralink, realtek... should all be vendors that work fairly well.
Try to get in early or / late on a week day - especially if you like to let your eyes / imaganitaion wander around uninterupted. Otherwise it gets somewhat crowded despite the fact that their limiting / scheduling aproach.
