New Laptop

I've baby stepped my way into free software and learned more as I go (can do lisp, c, and python now! woot!) about editing software. I've used everything from ubuntu to red hat and fedora and all those popular not-really-gnu distros and now i'm into trisquel(since its actually freedom-respecting). I'd like to be able to get a laptop to use for trisquel now; however, to be honest with myself (bracing myself for getting slammed in the comments) I'm not ready for the step of surrendering to a thinkpad to get a free bios; however, I do want to make sure that at least everything after that point is run in a non-free way. I don't intend on gaming on it so its GPU wouldn't need to be stellar, but I'm looking for something around 8GB of ram and has a battery life of 8-9 hours and a screen size of no bigger then 15 inches. Does anyone have any recommendations? I dont want to have to use usb devices to make up for lack of functionality on the laptop (like a wifi dongle) and would like to make sure that what I get can use 100% free drivers. I'm not quite sure where to look to find hardware lists with drivers compatible with trisquel so I can look this up myself. If some kind person can walk me through how to look this information, I have no problem figuring it out myself or if someone just has a recommendation I dont mind that either.

Maybe there will be a day that I can get to a free bios, but for what I use my laptop for, the ones that are libreboot compatible wouldn't work. It is, unfortunately at this point, something I can't quite budge on. Maybe if i pick up machine or assembly and start learning reverse engineering I can help with the BIOS projects (i probably used all the wrong words there..) to get myself to that point. But that day is not today, unfortunately.

Thank you in advance for your help and responses