my experience has been mostly good. I used to work on a beat-up hp low-end laptop from 2012, on which I put arch w/ i3-gaps. It had only one issue, a driver that killed the laptop on any sudden acceleration (to protect the hdd write heads on the original machine, I'd put in a ssd). I found a way to disable it and otherwise had no issues, everything was pretty snappy considering the slow i3 cpu.
On my current 2020 razer blade, I've had to create a workaround script for the intel backlight driver not working properly (on boot it maxes out at 30% backlight, but cat 100 to the correct file and the full range is unlocked). I still don't know how to handle plugging in external screens (e.g. to give presentations) but that's an i3-gaps issue and not the laptop's fault, and the battery life is pretty abysmal since graphics switching from the nvidia gpu to the igpu seems to disable using the gpu for cuda workloads (for which the fix is to have the charger with me at all times).
You may be interested in the game Screeps. From their website (name +.com):
"It's an open-source game for programmers, wherein the core mechanic is programming your units' AI. You control your colony by writing JavaScript. "