My first laptop was a MSI AMD+Nvidia, circa 2005. It was a low spec machine yet it outperformed and outlived laptops coworkers had with higher specs. Back then I used Ubuntu and drivers were available out of the box. It managed cpu better and the machine ran smoother than under windows, which would stress the cpu more. Ran it for almost 9 years and I retired it because it made no sense spending the €100+ to have the graphics card repaired.
From that point forward, all my AMD machines were always responsive and reliable.
My current desktop is already 10 years (Sempron based) old and it outperforms my laptop, which is 5 years younger (AMD as well).
I am a bit of a Linux missionary and every single machine I ever managed to bring to the dark side always ran smoother under Linux, regardless the core, but Intel often posed some extra hurdle to install. One particular case I still remember today was a laptop that required to manually install network card drivers, both wired and wireless. The required driver was available in the installer but it always failed to load.
I’ll risk anything from the last 10 years will be good. I’d personally recommend a minimum of 8GB of ram, DDR3. The technology is really cheap and mature at this point.