I too was surprise to read the actual number being so low considering how much it’s talked about. I never really saw the appeal as steam is pretty easy to get set up and running on any mainstream Linux distro with little fuss, but I recognize it was set up for newbies who want an gaming ready experience. It’s an interesting project regardless.

I started my Linux journey with Ubuntu, then switched to Linux Mint for a while and dabbled with Manjaro for a hot minute, and ultimately found my home on Fedora Workstation for the past several years. Once set up with rpmfusion and 3rd party codecs it’s a very solid and reliable distribution. The new atomic projects (and derivatives) look very interesting too.

You should be in a good place with a laptop with integrated intel/amd graphics, and an Intel wifi card. Graphics and wifi are the most common pain points when it comes to linux so you can narrow down and research from there. I’ve had good luck with Dell and Lenovo. Currently have a Lenovo yoga with touchscreen and everything except fingerprint scanner works out of the box.

There are some linux friendly OEMs too like framework, tuxedo, and ststem76 that are worth taking a look.