Have you tried looking for used thinkpads?

What trustworthy options do you have for acquiring hardware?

You could sync your photos folder between your devices using syncthing.

I mostly work in qtile in a fullscreen layout or a diagonal split between two windows. My hotkeys are super+d for rofi in dmenu mode and super+q for a shutdown menu also in rofi.

Install paru and use it to install mongodb from the aur.

Aren’t the megathreads synced?

A used framework 13 might be something for you