Laptops on the market go in and out of fashion like clothes, what will work best this season won’t be the best option this time next year.

You’re going to want a model with 16gb RAM. It will be enough to run programs like modern browsers, office programs like 365 or LibreOffice, certain creative softwares to some extent, and most older games.

AMD CPU and Graphics components are generally better for their price range, so a Ryzen i5 or i7 and a Radeon RX series would be ideal.

Storage is pretty important especially when using Linux distros because they can make use of Swap Partitions, which vastly expand the programs you’re able to run, so you want about 1TB storage SSD. She probably won’t use more but she also probably won’t run out of space any time soon unless she’s a world class photographer, a video editor, or an archivist.

So if we punch these into a search we find a couple options:

ASUS - Vivobook 16 16" FHD+ Laptop - AMD Ryzen 7 7730U with 16GB Memory - 1TB SSD - Indie Black on sale on Best Buy for $649

or a refurbished model:

Acer - Refurbished Excellent - Aspire Go 15 15.6" Touchscreen Laptop FHD AMD Ryzen 5 7520U 16GB 1TB SSD Radeon 610M AG15-21PT-R8TF for about $331.99

Note that the Ryzen 5 7520U came out in 2022 while the Ryzen 7 7730U came out in Q1 2023, so not much difference between the two in performance.

EDIT: You might also want to know how many USB ports you need, what type of port, if you need HDMI, if you need an SD Card port, etc. Most new laptops lack a disk drive, I think, as it adds too much vertical profile. They also might not fit in most bags such as a backpack if they’re too big.

EDIT 2: ah, I see you added more info to the post, that will be helpful for future commenters.