$300 is a really difficult price point for what youre asking for new. At the price, youre in the chromebook range, where even the windows machines are going to be as barebones as possible.

You want to step into the used market if you want customizable for $300. Getting something good thats a few years old like an lenovo carbon x1 looks possible, and they are a dream to update. The above supports linux with no issues.

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Most laptops won’t allow you to update parts, especially at that price. I think you’re better off getting a cheap laptop that has good reviews and you verify that Linux works in it. Personally, I’ve converted a few chromebooks to linux (making sure first that the CoreBoot BIOS/firmware works on these laptops).

I got a used ThinkPad for that price a year ago. Needed a laptop, and was a broke student. Really repairable - it’s easy to take apart, not glued, and most parts seem to be available at Aliexpress for reasonable prices. It’s still doing it’s job, and even though I could afford upgrading it now, I don’t really see a reason to.

The last time I had a look at the market for new laptops, most things 300€ (which should be close enough to $300) would buy you where, judging by the components, bound to be painfully slow. If it really needs to be new, I’d look for stores that have discounts, and look up the model on iFixit or a simmilar resource to check how repairable it is.

I can recommend minifree.org - this is a shop from Leah Rowe, who is the lead developer of the libreboot project. That is a (more secure) bios alternative, related to coreboot.

I bought my Thinkpad T400 from there, some 6 years ago or something. I am still writing on it and i can highly recommend it. However, today i would buy a smaller form factor. so 12,8° instead of 14°.

So it is kind of heavy compared to a macbook air and not the fastest machine, but you can get your stuff done. And it is really really durable, which is the reason i bought one of the older thinkpads.

Around $300, there would be the libreboot 820: https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-820/

And with minifree.org you can be sure that the linux/libreboot/coreboot support is really great. Because: since Leah is a developer, she testes everything beforehand and fixes problems when she notices it. So i would recommend to describe what you would want to do. For instance, initially i wanted to use a encrypted harddrive and i had installed the grub variant, but later upgraded to libreoot with seabios. This was much better and fixed the problems with my encrypted harddrive. But i suspect leah would have found out and fixed that already, had i told her that.

Also for instance, seabios has better openBSD support.

Do you need a laptop?

A mini PC may be a better bet - $300 on a mini PC will get you more hardware than a laptop at the same price as you’re not paying for the screen or chassy but you’d then need to supply a screen (TV would do), keyboard and mouse.

If you need the mobility then it’s a no go, but if you’re more looking for a device at home a PC is better value.

If you do need the mobility of a laptop, then you won’t get anything much new for $300 as others have said. You’d either need to increase your budget or look at second hand as others have said.

Framework laptops

Used business/enterprise stuff is generally decent, HP Elitebooks, Lenovo Thinkpads, etc…

Notebookcheck.net has an incredible search tool and they’ll have info about how difficult it is to open up and what items can be replaced.

Framework announced their B-stock systems for $500. That’s going to be your best bet for relatively new, upgradable, and kind close to $300.

Otherwise, gonna have to go used, and good luck with upgradability since everyone’s been soldering everything on for a decade.

The last thing you should be worrying about when buying a budget laptop is the expandability of the ram. it seriously doesn’t matter if you only have 4gb, Linux is so lightweight it runs completely fine.

imo you should be worrying about:

• display quality (even some ips displays look horrible)
• build quality (physically feel the keyboard, chassis flex, etc)
• battery life (for heavily used laptops account for the price of a replacement. for old thinkpads you can extend it dramatically with bigger bstteries)
• cpu speed (core count, single core performance, hyperthreading, etc. new celerons lose to i5s from 2013 lmao)
• storage (MAKE SURE IT’S NOT EMMC!!)

I got a used business dell a couple of years ago for £300. It still had active service warranty which dell transferred over to me. I upgraded the ram to 32gb and the ssd to 1tb and it was pretty decent for the time - i7 10th gen from memory (without grabbing the thing to check).