[hyp0]

NOT AN ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION, but the chromebooks seem the best value-for-money laptops - and already have a linux distribution installed (ChromeOS). The Acer C720 has a Haswell dual-core and 2GB RAM - lower speced than your needs. There's the Pixel, I guess... (much higher speced).

[danoprey]

Yup, I believe Linus uses the Pixel.

[moist]

There's also a 4GB RAM version of the C720 with a 32GB SSD.