I paid 350€ for my Thinkpad E580 with i7 and 32GB of ram.

Having said that my attempt to bear a corporate windows on a corporate laptop with WSL2 was terrible and I ended up installing linux on it and using the online version of office 365. I would run Linux as a host OS and a windows VM for anything specific to windows. There are ways to share filesystems nowadays.

> I think laptops with 32gb of RAM are too expensive for me.

ram is cheap. brand new things are too expensive. check ebay.

I dunno what you mean by "deal". You just install the required programs on it from your school, vscode and a chrome browser, and leave it alone. You dont have to manage it apart from occasional restarts for updates.

Whenever you wanna develop, just launch VSCode.

Once you are done with school, just install linux in it fully.

I don't know about the aesthetics, but it's "mostly reliable." It still breaks in undocumented and opaque ways from time to time, but that's life in the Windows ecosystem.

Depending on your budget I recently picked up a refurbished Thinkpad T580 with i7 / 32GB / 512GB for under €500. My first thinkpad and so far very impressed...

Upgrade the ram yourself. It's usually easy. Check a youtube video before buying to make sure the laptop design isn't hostile.