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x220 (8gb with samsung ssd, ips) running ubuntu. works fine, but i'm thinking it's way over your budget. x220 has been around long enough that refurb or second hand is probably a good deal...

[edit: huh, look it's now x230...]

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I got my x220 refurb last spring for under $700. I love it -- very portable and the battery life is ~6-7 hours. I run Arch Linux [1] and haven't had any issues, so you should be good to go with Ubuntu.

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/

Actually the fact that you run Arch Linux _can_ have an effect. Arch being a rolling release distro, you pretty much always have an up to date kernel. I've experienced issues (broadcom wireless for instance) on ubuntu that were due to the use of an older kernel. The issues magically disappeared once I compiled a newer kernel. Not a difficult task, but since it took me some time to track down a solution, I thought it was worth mentionning.

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