don't know if a refurbished thinkpad is good if you're on a budget, by the time you realise you might have a couple dozen of them on your desk all running linux
everytime you copy paste a terminal command, try see if you can understand what it's doing with: $ tldr mycommand (you need tealdeer installed)and$ mycommand --helpimo this is way more concise and beginner friendly than reading man pages
why do you want it to be arch based in particular? the entire point of an arch based distro is that you're rawdogging it.if you want something simple, use something Ubuntu/debian based. if you want something more complex, just try arch, it's not that hard
try arch with something comfortable like kde, you seem like you're at the perfect skill level for trying it out
kw(h*day)^-1