there is one more thing - unless you are using something like chaotic aur, or a very popular package, please pay attention to PKGBUILDS. These are essentially bash scripts which can (depending on your package manager) will run with highest permissions. They can do anything

I second this - for some reasons, my (almost) first distro was arch (first was a fedora for 3-4 days). Arch is great if you know what you are doing, you can have a lean mean compute machine

I have a question, what are you exactly seeking to repair?, like if you have a good working laptop, and if it gives good performance, then there may not be much need of repairing. One of the reasons for getting repairable hardware is that they last long, like I have laptops which are 13 and 7 years old, and they both “work”, batteries are dead, and replacements are not good, but other than that fine machines. If your laptop is not very flimsy, you may not even need an upgrade for a long time.

well even a raspberry pi would be enough, except for ML

depending on what exactly in ML, and what our the sizes of datasets involved?, like i did some work, but for me 8 GiB RAM was enough, but if you want to do larger databases, you would need somewhat good GPU (essentially large matrix multipliers) with plenty of VRAM