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For me the most interesting distros are vanilla binary rolling-release ones, which ship all stuff from upstream unchanged. I love Arch, but Slackware and a few others are interesting too.

These make it easy to set up a simple system with few moving parts, which is fast and doesn't break. I just a tiling window manager (xmonad), a terminal (urxvt), a browser (firefox with vimperator) and emacs.

And Nix-style ones, NixOS and GuixSD, are the future. Declarative system configuration and package definitions. Non-destructive changes.

In terms of laptops, I'm really fond of Xiaomi Air 12 M3. Fanless, really good quality, cheap and all stock Intel components. So it just works.

I have Arch with Gnome on the 4K HP Spectre x360 13 inch, and everything basically just works. Even mixed-DPI with a standard HD monitor.

I got a cheezy second hand Lenovo Y40 from Craigslist for about $200 and put Debian on it. Not even close to top of the line but it works great for my development needs.