Dear Forum,

In a previous thread I was first looking at buying a System76 laptop, but later discovered problems with importing it to my home in Sweden. Also, my budget ambition shrank somewhat. That thread became clogged. Thus my issue morphed, and now I present to you a different set of questions.

My budget shrank, I am now looking at trying to stay under ca. 800 dollars if possible. My main goal is slightly increasing my gaming potential compared to my current Acer Aspire e15 (AMD A8-6410 quadcore "up to 2.4ghz", 8gb RAM, Radeon Mullins with "1gb dedicated VRAM").

With my new laptop, I would like to play Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, Pillars of Eternity, XCOM2, Superhot, Signal from Tölva and the like on low/medium settings, but smooth.

I would prefer a computer with linux pre-installed, but I cannot find any cheap ones. The best I've found is this:
GGS-Data Style-Note N240WU-8250 (Intel® Core™ i5-8250U 1,6 GHz, 6 MB Cache, "Kaby Lake-R" + Intel® UHD Graphics 620
But it is probably too expensive at around a 1000 dollars.

The questions is, should I go for a semi-new but budget laptop like:
1. the Acer Aspire 5 15,6" HD (Radeon RX540,AMD A10-9620P Quad Core,8GB RAM,128GB SSD) and just nuke the windows out of it and call it a day? Is that one good enough? I'ts like my current one but new. Nice to have open source drivers, they seem to support the RX540 well. Also, on a related note, for a 100 dollars more you get fullhd instead of hd, but that does not matter does it? I do not care about eyecandy.
2. Or should I go for an cheap Intel one with integrated graphics?

Or should I look at the second hand market? I found this one on "blocket", a swedish second hand site, it's a Asus ROG G771JW (Intel core i7, 2,6 ghz 4:th generation, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M) for 800 dollars. Good value, or is the old cpu much worse than a newer generation?

Where do I get the best value?

Perhaps I should just wait a couple of years and get a fancy new one later. My current one does play many games already... At what time during the year is it best to buy new laptops?