I just got into tying knots! It's a useful skill. You can pick it up in a couple of minutes and then improve continuously. There are a lot of books on the subject. It's cheap. You can use cord you might already have lying around the house, or you can get paracord at the hardware store, or you can go somewhere fancy like Paracord Galaxy if you want some extra special colors or patterns. It's soothing and leaves you with something tangible at the end.

Here's a monkey's fist knot I just finished! I've been giving them to friends to use as keychains.

I do quite a lot of writing, knitting, gaming, crochet, website making, and game development on my old T430. Also emacs is a hobby, and I use it with all of the above, so count that in xD

• Writing: Good creative outlet, lotta fun, you can do it on a toaster if you're really strapped for PC specs. Fanfic is especially fun, and a very common way to cut your chops writing.
• Knitting: Useful! You get clothes and wash rags and bags at the end of it! Can be rough on the hands though.
• Crochet: See knitting. Harder on the hands IMO, but I also tension like I'm strangling someone, so that could be my fault.
• Gaming: Depends on the game you're playing. Retro stuff does well, and is a fun hobby in itself.
• Website making: It's fun having a blog, and if you want to feed the writing into it you could even do some basic ARG-type stuff.
• Game development: RPG Maker, Godot, and Ren'py all work well. If you can't draw there are some premade assets on itch.io to play around with, free and paid. Requires less coding than you'd expect, especially with RPGMaker/Ren'Py

There are many things not requiring the use of any laptop, powerful or not.

• Read books. There are billions of books out there waiting to be read. New ones, old ones, fictions, essays, in whatever 'genre' you may fancy. You can even read them for free, by borrowing them from your local public library.
• As suggested: a #2 pencil (HB, for the non-US world, but I would suggest 2B myself: a slightly fatter/darker type of lead), a few sheets of paper or a sketchbook (for portability) and start sketching. You can sketch daily life objects. If don't believe me (and why should you?) go read/look at 'Everyday matters' by Dany Gregory (he also has a YT channel, if you prefer watching moving pictures instead of turning pages but I think are way more... complete and interesting than most of his videos). You may even throw in a small and cheap set of non-pro watercolors (it will be much cheaper than artist-grade ones, and you need needs hundreds of colors either: a set of 12 is more than enough, heck even just 6 colors would be excellent), as they can help you realize you're more interested in painting than sketching. And since they're water-based, you wont get nasty smells like with oil painting, eve when doing it at home ;)
• Find some craft, DIY activity you enjoy? Younger I was into little scale models (plastic planes and tanks that I glued and painted), now I'm much more into crafting things we will use at home.
• Play chess? A great way to make people IRL: chess clubs, cafés, any places where (amateur) chess players like to meet. Unlike most video games it's not 'limited' to a few hours of fun and excitement: people have been playing chess for thousand of years and they're still playing it with the same excitement today: it's challenging and there is no end to it.. and every one can play (even little kids, and even bad players like myself) ;)
• Exercises. I do long daily walks. It changed my life at least as much as learning to read changed it when I was a child.

Ive thought about many of things but im unsure if i should try them

Why would that be? There is no harm in trying things out.

Blender. Free and incredibly versatile 3D modelling software. Learning curve is a bit steep but YT has tons of tutorials to help you stumble along.

3D modeling.

Check out Ryan King Art on youtube. Follow along with his guides.

I second 3D modeling, it's super fun and entertaining. Blender is the software.

Ive thought about many of things but im unsure if i should try them?

You should definitely try them. What have you got to lose?

Since you're a creative sort, why not make zines? Scribus is a free layout tool you could use to build them and there are plenty of free templates available.

Assuming you want to use the laptop for this hobby, I would suggest getting a cheap, secondhand camera, old DSLRs are like £50 with a lens and perfectly fine starting point, but you can spend as much as you want on a setup. Only recommendation I would make, is get something thats still supported today for the lens mount type, that way you know you have a constant upgrade path.

Get the camera with the right lens included for what you want to start taking, additional lenses will increase the budget significantly even at the bottom end as they can often work well with better (and more expensive) camera bodies if you decide to upgrade later on.

Then you can use Darktable & GIMP to play with the photos to your hearts content or "spend" on Light Table & Photoshop. You can do anything from basic image correction up to full blown re-imaginings of your photos. Plenty of online tutorials to walk you through the processes.

Make music

Indie game development. Tons of great, free (even foss), frameworks out there these days. Try ebitengine for an awesome 2d framework.

Fuck it. Battletech.

Have you tried crochet or knitting? It can be both simple and complicated, big and small projects.

Knitting is more suitable for clothes, stretchy things.

Crochet is more suitable for stiff things like amiguries, bags etc.

You can 100% make clothes with crochet and bags with knitting. It's maybe not as common only

Origami, you can start very cheap and simple and with time get into as complex as you want and still not expensive.

I go through phases of collecting/trialing hobbies as a hobby. I develop a list of things I'm interested in, what about them is drawing my interest, how much it would cost to jump into entry-level projects, and a target I want to hit to understand if it's a hobby I want to keep one not. Also how I'll learn.

So for me that looks something like:

1. leatherworking, I really want a customized notebook holder that fits exactly what I'm looking for. That's $20 in basic tools, $50 in leather including enough for simpler projects as I develop skills. Target is to try something simple, like a baggage tag or simple bifold wallet to see if I like it before spending more time and money on it. Plenty of YouTube videos available, local Tandy store has classes, my sister also knows the basics.

2. digitizing the parents' photo negatives. I want a brain dead project to do while watching movies during cold winter evenings when I'm not going outside. Cost is negligible, I have the stuff I need. Time needed to develop a good workflow and file naming and tagging system. Maybe some YouTube videos if needed, brother is a photographer and willing to consult on workflow. Longer term: buy external hard drives and gift to siblings or talk to brother about his Immich server. Branch off into new project to self-host Immich myself?

I have six more items on the "do I want to turn these into hobbies" list. It's a hobby in itself to learn about and plan potential hobbies.

If you like being broke, Warhammer 40000

Game development. Just to make a simple 2D game you have tools that require varying amounts of money, from nothing to a few hundred bucks. Look into Game Maker and Godot, or RPG Maker if you want to make an RPG. If you don’t want to code, Game Maker or RPG Maker are probably your best bet.

Soldering. You don't need a huge amount of space. A desk and a box to keep stuff in. You can buy reference kits which allows you to build your own devices like headphones amplifiers. The reference kit should come with instructions and the PBC board will show which components go where. Kind of like painting with numbers.

Once your confident with it then it's also useful. Replace bad caps on monitors, motherboards, anything really.

If you have the resources to spare, grab a pad of paper and a basic #2 pencil, or a box of crayons, colored pencils, chalk, charcoal, whatever, and pick up drawing with it?

Also, there's plenty of easy, and actually kinda fun, crafts you could mess around with.

Although, given this is traditional art or crafts I'm suggesting, you'll also need some way to digitize it if you want to show it off online.

Go outside more

Learn Rust or another programming language. Useful to know something to expand your ability.

Do you want to do your hobby on a laptop? Learn Blender, it's free. You can also pirate other software such as zbrush and go nuts have fun with that.

Do you want to have your hobby at home but not on a laptop? Well, gardening, sketching, learn to play an instrument, cooking.

Do you want your hobby to get you out of the house? I recommend tabletop gaming. Birdwatching. Photography

Factorio

I like to program as a hobby (though I also do it as a professional, so I get a lot of paid time to learn this stuff too) and so much stuff is just freely available online. Tutorials, documentation, tools, whatever, mostly open-source which means free to use and play with as you please.

You can make web pages with nothing but a text editor and any one of a million guides on web programming. Just put HTML code in a text file and open it in your browser, and bam you’ve got a web page. You can gradually learn stuff like CSS and JavaScript to make them look neat and do cool stuff. Then you can use GitHub Pages to deploy your pages to the internet for other people to see and use. Or learn a programming language like Python to build a web server that serves up that HTML you learned. You don’t need a beefy machine at all to write code.

3D printing, mainly because you can use it to amplify just about any other hobby, and maybe save some money printing things you would have bought. Sure, you can print goofy little doodads and shit, but there are infinite practical uses as well. Get good with 3D modeling, and now you can transform ideas into physical concepts. And let me tell you, there is no feeling or sense of satisfaction quite like holding something functional you designed and made yourself for $2.50 in materials and a few hours of your time. Especially if you saved yourself a few hundred bucks not buying something new.

I write fanfiction and make YouTube videos using a program called imovie

OpenStreetMap

Crochet, knitting, sewing and general ropecraft are some of the best ways to build dexterity, focus hand eye coordination, and train your brain at the same time.

It doesn't require electricity, the bar to entry is so low you can knit with two chopsticks, some twine, and a book from the library.

Added bonus of anyone who says knitting is for old biddies and women will only ever say that kind of shit when you're not holding two footlong metal spikes.

As an added bonus you get a whole physical item that you created yourself.

https://learnyouahaskell.github.io/ if you want to actually use the laptop.

Volunteer for things you find interesting or fun.

Check out OpenStreetMap:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
And help map out your area.

You can help out with a variety of different research projects over on the Zooniverse:
https://www.zooniverse.org/

Help out with research on wildlife in your area:
https://www.inaturalist.org/

Contribute to Wikipedia:
https://www.wikipedia.org/

If you feel passionate about consumer rights, you can contribute to the wiki here:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page

If you like to tinker with electronics, check out Fulu Bounties and get paid for helping to get around DRM on refrigerators or on an Xbox.
https://bounties.fulu.org/

Then of course there's always volunteering for organizations nearby.

Why? I have reasons for each of these projects but for me it just sparks joy in contributing to projects that will help others.

My laptop oriented hobbies in no particular order: Coding, music making, writing, 3d modeling, gaming

What's your budget? You can get a ukulele or guitar for fairly cheap, and there are websites full of chords or tabs for songs. You can play hundreds of songs if you just know a few chords.

There are tutorial videos on YouTube to get you started. Play and sing along. You'll suck at first, but if you keep at it and play every day you'll get to be pretty good.

I got onto design there for a while. Sketchup Make is still free out there if you can find it. Blender is also an option.

Learning is another option. Khan Academy, MIT Open Courseware.

Brewing, taking care of plants, terrariums, puzzles, bonsai, yoga. All good stuff.

roguelike development

I enjoy disc golf. Many courses are in public parks and discs are cheap.

Mobile app development

Programming. You need to have a project in mind to get motivated, but it's cool being able to built an app you can run on your mobile device.

If you think making music in your web browser sounds cool and arent completely averse to text based programming, you should try out https://strudel.cc/

Example of a cool person on youtube doing this live

Functional example from the softwares introduction guide

Writing is cheap and easy to start, but with so much skill to build

Hobyist math can be quite fun, especialy if you know a bit of programming.

Go outside

I like writing stories.

With a little help of AI you can also try indie game dev. My advice - use it as an interactive tutorial and better search engine. You can learn a lot when AI gives you examples and then do your own thing.

Blender, 3d modeling, vfx, drawing, etc. Whatever you like. I spent like a year learning blender when I was broke, jobless, and had a lot of free time. (last year lol) I got into simracing and bought a bundle a few months ago a d hve been mostly doing that lately tho.

It's unclear if you want to have a hobby on a laptop or whether that doesn't matter.

If it doesn't - mending is great. Some people have already recommended knitting and crotcheting, and while mending clothes is usually a mix of these two and sewing, I find it easier and faster paced than making something anew. Also regarding the sustainability aspect - buying new yarn and making something that you possibly might not need or enjoy vs repairing something you own and might otherwise throw out (and if you end up messing up you have hardly any losses. It was a try to save something from the landfill). It's in a way a gateway to knitting, sewing, crotcheting, embroidery, but it is great on its own.

But it doesn't have to be just clothes. Trying to figure out how you can make broken stuff last longer or adapt it as necessary is also great.

The only downside is that if you work a lot on your computer or something desktop-ish, then you might want to choose something outside to give your eyes a rest from focussing on something that is rather close.