(Solved) An inexpensive 10" laptop to run Linux.

Define cheap. 11" Dell 3140's in like new condition with Intel N200 processors, 8GB RAM, wifi, SSD and a decent keyboard have been coming up on Ebay and Woot every few weeks for $170 or so. Debian 12 detects all hardware immediately on installation.

Find an old chrome book that has an x86 cpu and can do core boot. I got mine for $10.
- Is coreboot that system where the machine basically boots into a FORTH interpreter that has vocabulary words to read and boot from various media. That would be sweet - Forth is a hoot once you get used to it.

For those needs, an old used thinkpad off ebay would be pretty ideal. Affordable, well built and reliable. Only downside is I think the smallest model is a 12"
Perhaps a Chromebook known for being compatible with being flashed with Linux?
- Thinkpad made 10" models?
  ... I found the Thinkpad 10, which is a tablet computer and a bit ridiculous for OPs intentions (or mine, for that matter, I'm looking for me too, lol).
  Edit: the comment I'm replying to didn't mention size when I replied.
  
  there's the Thinkpad Mini 10 but like uhhh uhhhhhhhhhhh i wouldn't recommend it

Firstly, yes, what OP wants is absolutely feasible in principle. I've used fanless low-powered laptops as my only device for years now, for same use case as OP - terminal plus browser. First was an 11in Asus netbook, right now a Celeron-powered model with fully 8GB ram. Neither have been "slow" at all, in fact probably faster than some of the Windows machines I've used in the past for work. HD video runs flawlessly, which is as much as I'll ever need. For both of them I paid as little as you'd expect - in the low hundreds, new. To be honest I often get the feeling many people are buying super overpowered laptops. If you're on Linux and not gaming or doing CAD it's a complete waste of money to spend 1000 bucks on a laptop. That's my opinion, backed by very deep experience.
In response to the question, the problem is that the netbook niche is now occupied by Chromebooks. Which are a PITA to get working with Linux due to the bootloader lockdown - although OP seems to have the secret for making that easy. Otherwise you need to go up to around 350 bucks for the lowest-end Wintel devices which are not bulky with horrible fans, or else buy second-hand as others are recommending.
- Old MacBook Airs have fans but they rarely come on. I got a 2013 for $70 last summer and use it everyday.

Ok I finally bit the bullet - Windows is blown away. I have not played Timberborn in over 2 months and having a windows machine on my network has always kinda made me feel like I had a spy in the house. Unfortunatly the wife works from home so there are still two windows machines I can't do anything about. My ASUS Vivobook i7 15" laptop is getting Debian but no GUI installed. I don't need a GUI to setup tailscale do I? Anyone know of a good settlement or city building game that is free and runs under Linux?
- FYI, Timberborn plays just fine on Linux. Most games do these days.
  Check out ProtonDB.com. You don't necessarily need Steam either, so you could probably do it just CLI if you really wanted.
  
  The issue so far is that I bought the Windows version of Timberborn on Steam, so it won't install on my Linux box. Do you suppose since I own the Windows version, the makers of Timberborn would allow me to download the appropriate files for Linux? I thought I had gotten it working last night, but instead I was just streaming it from the windows box.

No one is making 10" models. You'd need to buy a used netbook from 2010 to get a 10" screen. Get a normal laptop please.

Any model from any major brand made in the last 10 years off craigslist?
With that kind of spec I, don't know what you're expecting—anything that turns on will be able to do that.
- The hard part is tiny: 10" diagonal screen and really cheap: like milk money cheap - - Perhaps a netbook would work, some of them were Linux based right?
  
  Asus EEE models were around 10” screens. Should work in CLI. Desktop environment might struggle a bit
  Saw a few on eBay for 50 bucks
  
  I got a $12 10 inch Asus eeepc 1005ha that I have NetBSD with i3 on and it's perfectly usable, so something similar to that would probably be fine for linux cli stuff as long as a 32 bit cpu is okay
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Latitude-3190-11-6inch-Gorilla/dp/B07RXH56C5/
  $89. The alternatives are $180+, so this is about as good as you're going to get unless you go second hand, and most of the time second hand is more expensive than new because people want to recoup the costs as much as possible without actually thinking about what a fair price is.
  
  Netbooks, haven’t seen them in a decade. They were sluggish at best even running linux. The screens were awful. Seriously, I can’t recommend. A refurbished 10” tablet with a bluetooth keyboard would work 10 times better.
  
  You don't really need one that is specifically Linux based, as you can format a windows box to Linux at will. Really any 10" laptop you find on cragslist or ebay should do.
  Honestly, the only difficult requirement will be the 10" part. 12"-13" are much more common for small laptops.
  
  The Asus EeePC 1000H that I bought back in 2009 is a 10 inch monitor netbook. 160 GB HDD because I didn't go with SSD, only came with 1 GB of RAM and cruicially was offered in both Windows XP and Linux flavor which was a bit niche at the time.
  Its 32-bit single core (hyperthreading) atom processor is very slow at 1.6GHz, but it can still be used with antiX for my usecase.
  If you manage to get hold of one of these old dinosaurs, I'd probably opt for an SSD solution, that's a pretty big bottleneck.
  
  Just use a phone?

Is there some reason why it needs to be 10" specifically? 10" is a pretty uncommon size, and may needlessly limit your options to ancient netbooks from 15 years ago.
If something like a used 11-13" business laptop would be acceptable for your use case then there are a whole slew of options in the $50-70 range on ebay, maybe less if you find a good deal. I think there is also something to be said for getting something with a halfway reasonable keyboard which will not be agonizing to type on.
- I really just want small and light, and Cheap. 11" is fine. I have a 15" right now. If I decide to give up on Timberborn (I rarely play it and it is the only thing that keeps a windows machine on hand) then this could get re-installed with probably debian with no GUI... I play it rarely, but I still play it. I wish I could get it to run under Debian 12 on my main machine.
  
  Timberborn is awesome. I play on the stable release (non-experimental branch) through Proton experimental and it runs about as well as it did under Windows. I'm running Bazzite (Fedora) though so my system is much more up to date than Debian, but I bet one of the awesome nerds here could help you get it running on Debian.
  Proton DB page for the people smarter than I am, lol
  
  I think an 11" laptop would probably be a better bet. Taking a quick look on Ebay, I am seeing things like Dell 3190s, 3180s and Lenovo Yoga 11e laptops for around $50 or so. I see some chromebooks with x86 processors for as little as $35, but I do not have much experience with installing Linux on chromebooks and so you may want to double-check how to do that before buying anything.

Maybe check your local Craigslist or e-waste recycler? Someone on Craigslist near-ish me has a 10" Dell Inspiron laptop for $25. There's also a HP mini 110 that the seller is asking way too much for, lol.
That size of laptop/netbook has kind of fallen out of fashion and it seems to be touchscreen tablet-likes in that size now. You'll want to keep build quality in mind with the older machines because a lot of stuff is soldered together at that size and age, I had a HP Stream 11 and the hardware recently failed - it was e-waste when I bought it but it ran Linux well until it died.
- Yeah, This sounds like the thing.. I really have to limit the cost to "Recycle cans and bottles" money because we (wife and I) recently bought me parts for a mini-ATX workstation ~$500.00 i5 8gb memory and an SSD I already had.

If you can accept 11” the old intel macbook airs are what you’re asking for.
They’re in the free - $50 price range now.

I have a 1st Gen Surface Go running Kubuntu and it works pretty well. Oddly, the Stylus works better using Wayland than X11. I don't use it for much other than note taking and remote access to my main computer, and they're available on ebay for around $100-150.