I'm looking into Proton, Windscribe and AirVPN atm.
Travelling the high seas is my main reason for a VPN. In the past I didn't use it enough to switch from Mullvad, which I liked except for their port forwarding switch.
T480. Still good availability. It was popular with companies that put them back into th e market a few years ago.
Last model without glued RAM. So it's upgradable and you can install two M.2 drives. One with 2240 length and a full-size 2280 in the main drive bay.
The battery setup is great as well. One internal battery plus an external you can choose depending on your needs. Either small and light for a bit more juice or big and heavy for max runtime.
Neat little guide (Arch, systemd) to set up automatic snapshots when you run a pacman/yay update and the option to chose snapshots in grub during startup. Really useful.
I use Auto CPU Freq on my T480 and am satisfied so far.