The Echo Mini is pretty good and they’ve been updating the firmware to add stuff for a while now. My biggest gripes with it would be there is a hard limit of a little over 8000 songs even if there is enough space for more on your SD card. It’s something to do with how it indexes the library. It also doesn’t really support playlists, although I think the most recent update allows you to play everything within a genre so you could do some shenanigans with that.

I remember hearing about System76 a while back. They manage Pop!_OS which comes preloaded on their stuff. I don’t know much more than that. If you are mainly looking to replace your laptop because you don’t want to switch to 11, you could always try out Linux on it with a live USB. Basically you format a thumb drive to act as a boot drive. There are resources online on how to do it and it’s pretty simple. It doesn’t mess with your current install. If you like it, you can fully install it later.

It’s a little more than kind of depressing but Bullet by Hollywood Undead comes to mind.

Just keep in mind you can run into issues with some of the highest capacity cards. There are limits to how much music an ipod can handle depending on the generation which aren’t immediately obvious. Dankpods mentioned it in one of his older videos.

If you’re on a Mac, I think ipods are still recognized and you can use their software to sync and manage music. You can only sync over music you own so no apple music obviously.

FiiO makes some pretty good stuff. I love my BTR5 to use with some of my wired headphones. I recently bought an Echo Mini cause I liked the retro look and wanted something dead simple to just play music and it’s just ok. No support for playlists which is interesting. It also has a hard limit of around 8000 songs. Their android based stuff seems popular though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_God_for_Mississippi