Even though I don’t typically recommend an immutable distro to people with minimal Linux experience, as a dev and a gamer I’ve been pretty happy with the various uBlue images. Bluefin is a great out of the box image for devs and the uBlue images have a lot of compatability improvements over the Fedora ostree image their based off of. Bazzite is another good one specifically built for gaming.
Now that apple has their own silicon, all the older intel based MacBooks are pretty cheap. I just replaced my wife’s 2013 MacBook Airs battery, upgraded the drive, and installed Linux. It’s been a solid little laptop. Not the fastest but there’s probably a few pro models within your price range. Just make sure to get at least a 16gb model since the ram is soldered. Might have issues with the webcam, but the wifi drivers are pretty good.