@Mint_Raccoon
@kbin.socialThey've already been mentioned, but The Dead Milkmen are exactly what you're looking for.
I have a T480 that I'm very happy with. With shipping I paid a little under $250. It came with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (which I replaced with a larger one).
I've used KDE on a Thinkpad T60, it's about 17 years old, has 3GB of RAM, and a Core Duo. It ran surprisingly well. Replacing the HDD with a SSD can also make a noticeable difference, so you should consider that if you haven't already. I also turned off a lot of the animations and effects for better performance.
I took a programming class in highschool, so I know some BASIC. Not that I've ever used it since then.
In my experience, it's idependently unless updating breaks a version dependency on another package. In that case pacman won't update anything until the issue is resolved. I think I've only ever had this happen with AUR packages.
It's through Proton, but the game runs flawlessly. Do note that you're really going to want a controller for this one. Playing this with a keyboard is a miserable experience. Another thing is that there's an unofficial tool for importing images over your custom graffiti, but it's for Windows and I've never tried it with Wine.