[ppurka]

I would suggest going for an NUC (at least core i3). These are small, has enough computational power for the tasks you want to do, runs OK with Linux, and can run VM if you want to from time to time. You can likely reuse the SSD from the Thinkpad if it is of the right kind.

Personally, I purchased an NUC with i3 that is only marginally slower than a 2013 Dell XPS 13 with core i7 (noticable only in compile times of software). I used the SSD from the Dell laptop via an adapter, and run Linux on it.