[karka91]

Usually everything works out of the box even with relatively new laptops. Driver problems and heavy manual fiddling is a scare from the olden days. You might need some extra effort if you want to make full use of the gpu but this doesn't seem to a factor if you'll do web dev.

For distros - Ubuntu will give you most out of the box but I'd suggest trying Archlinux. The wiki is so much better then what ubuntu has to offer and it has info on more exotic problems. I found it way more stable and usable then ubuntu.

For brands - lenovo thinkpads work great. Asus has great support too, though headphones/mic combo jack has some issues on certain models

[juliangoldsmith]

As a regular Arch user, I would not recommend it for new Linux users. When things go wrong in Arch, they have a tendency to go very wrong (e.g. when they symlinked /bin and /lib to /usr/bin and /usr/lib, which caused major problems if you didn't follow the news and just did a normal update).