I’m looking to purchase a Laptop off of Amazon when my student loan comes through. I’m from the UK and my budget is 500(gbp). Probably want an i5 and 8gb ram. HDD isn’t an issue cause I can upgrade to an SSD later. My main thing is Linux support. I got an Acer last year and the secure boot in the BIOS was a pain in the arse to work around to get Ubuntu to install. Ended up just giving up and just keeping it Windows as it was less stressful lol. Any options would be great :).
You good check for chromebook. Chrome OS is Linux based thus the hardware should be supported and there is a standard way to unlock it and install linux on it.
Otherwise you can check the dell laptops that come with ubuntu preinstalled.
https://www.overstock.com/Electronics/Laptops/Dell,8-GB,/brand,standard-memory,/133/subcat.html
The older Dells are a pretty sure bet. I use an old Latitude at work and it runs Linux great.
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Lenovo thinkpads (t,x,w,p series) are red-hat certified the only thing I’ve ever had to install is a fingerprint driver on certain distros. Also they’re are written step by step tutorials for disabling Intel ME if free open software is your jam. Not to mention getting spare parts and fixing broken bits is easy. I use a x230 everyday and haven’t found a reason to upgrade in years.
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I use a Lenovo ThinkPad t430s for my general programming and other work, with only debian 9 installed. (Non-free only enabled for Intel Wi-Fi drivers, have not tried Bluetooth). It works well with Linux, and a basic 4gb ram, 320gb 7200 rpm hdd seems to be around £200 on ebay, windows 10 installs are common. The laptop has two ram slots so the ram can be upgraded (ddr3 sodimm, normal voltage?). The only real drawbacks to the laptop are that the best screen is 1600x900 with bad viewing angles and that the battery only lasts a couple of hours, the only extension is a little ultrabay one (I don’t have one, since it would cost more than half of what I spent on my laptop). Otherwise, great laptop with full voltage mobile i5, great keyboard, think light for the dark, and good ports.
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Think he can even get a T450s for that (500gbp) kind of money.
I use one of these as a work laptop
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834296785&cm_re=dell_latitude--34-296-785--Product
I’ve put Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 on it, Kali, and Fedora on it, all ran fine. Backlit keyboard is always nice, and if you’re like me and hate having to unscrew 48 fucking screws or use 5 exacto knives to open a laptop (looking at you Macs), you’ll love this one. One captive screw is all that holds on the bottom plate, undo that and slide it off and you can access pretty much all the guts of the laptop. Fucking fantastic.
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I also recommend ThinkPads.
You might be able to find an X1 Carbon used. Just make sure it has the memory and storage you need because upgrades are not really doable.
Know someone with a t440s and the real track point buttons fitted with a replacement track pad. Agree that the t450s is a good option. The battery life would be a lot better, at cost of undervolted class cpu(not much worse though). Probably better if you would be carrying it around and using it in various places throughout the day without charging options.
I too have a T430s and used it back when I was studying, and aside from the battery life, it was perfect, but the battery life really is abysmal. OP could get a regular T430 with the 9-cell, that would probably be one of the best price to performance choices.
They’re usually pretty good but the only potential issue is the WLAN module. They like to use broadcom chips which don’t have any halfway decent Linux support.
That might explain why network manager has to be restarted once and a while in Ubuntu.
Possibly. If you’ve got a broadcom card, you’ll have trouble of some sort on most distros. The safe bet is to allocate $40 or so into your budget to buy an intel chip.
I will try and remember to check what chip is in it next time I am there. 
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If I were inclined to go with new hardware, i’d go with a Chromebook and install Linux on it. For an older, used machine, I’d go with a ThinkPad T440, with an i5 4300U CPU for better battery life.
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In general, my experience has been that anything from Dell runs Linux fine. You can probably check if Dell was selling Ubuntu versions of the laptop at some point - if that’s the case it will probably run any distribution of Linux.
I’ve also heard consistently that Thinkpads run Linux very well.