I recommend looking for refurbished laptops. As they'd give you better bang for buck. If you do indeed to with refurbished laptop, check everything thoroughly before buying including how long the battery lasts and if the display has any deffects.

People drive in different sides in different parts of the world.

Forget left-right. Use port and starboard.

Mint. LMDE.

As far as my understanding goes, Zed uses the GPU only for rendering things on screen. And from what I've heard, most editors do that. I don't understand why Zed uses that as a key marketing point

Everyone on Lemmy is a chatbot except you.

It would indeed be a waste of time. So, no, not worth it.

Whatever comes with the DE. I don't use it enough to have a favorite.