I do, but the other way as I'm getting old and can't down them like I used to. Met up with a mate to watch the F1 in the pub garden on a sunny Sunday, just had a couple of halves as I still wanted to try a number of new drops
Though I completely understand using alcohol to loosen up a bit, for numerous social situations. Definitely used it more that way in my younger days, to varying degrees of success
This isn't the smallest you can go per se and isn't a laptop but I've happily run PopOS on my Surface Pro 8 for over a year. You lose the front camera due to the proprietary blobs, and there's some tweaking needed such as to get the keyboard working for LUKS decrypt but it's pretty damn good for those tasks you mention. I read a lot of comics and RPG rule/corebooks and it's perfect for that plus some light browsing and media consumption. Biggest downsides are the battery life which isn't great compared to on Windows (around 5hrs or so, up to 7 with light usage) but that's Linux for you, and ofc it's more awkward to balance the folio keyboard on your lap. But for all that, it's pretty convenient to take around plus you get the benefit of that bright, Surface Pro display
It's a good topic to raise, laptop battery life is definitely still a weak point on Linux. I'm not sure there's any distro specifically geared towards extending battery life, but maybe choosing one with a light desktop environment would help? I'm no expert myself but it also depends on the device you're using and it's platform.
For example, one common power management tool tlp https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html is not recommended by AMD or Framework for my FW13. There are steps you can take, like ensuring your browser is using the GPU/iGPU for videos/hardware acceleration is enabled and working, but Linux as a whole does not seem to have prioritised improving battery life. It's understandable to a degree, with it being dependent on so many factors
This is the way, you can pick up a Surface Pro 6 for under £250 here on eBay, i7 and 16GB