Hi all, recently I got my partner an older Lenovo laptop (x280) to replace her aging Chromebook. I swapped the windows OS for Linux, and installed MC, hoping to get her into playing with me. She does enjoy playing, but that computer is just too weak to run it without it looking like shit and lagging like crazy. I’d like to get her something else that would be dedicated to playing minecraft, but because it would EXCLUSIVELY be for playing MC, I don’t want to spend a lot of cash. It doesn’t have to be a laptop (I’d expect it to be cheaper to not be one), but I’d like it to be smaller than a full-fledged desktop. Her current x280 has an intel i7 (1.9ghz) and 16GB RAM, so I’m guessing the issue is the video card or lack there of. I’m not looking for minimum specs, so answers from official documentation is pretty hard to apply here. Does anyone have any experience running MC smoothly on something like a NUC or other miniPC?

(we only play multiplayer Java edition on my self hosted server running Paper. No mods yet, but I think eventually Ill get into the mod game.)