Make music

3D modeling.

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

Not gooning.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Fuck it. Battletech.

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

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

That’s an extremely open ended question with countless answers…

• speedrun your favorite game
• become a youtuber and play games while streaming
• play a game with just your feet
• play a game blindfolded
• play a game randomizer
• learn to program
• program shit
• learn an instrument
• play music and post it online
• make shitposts
• learn to draw
• draw porn
• draw not porn
• write poems
• film solo comedy skits
• do multiple of these things at once

…do anything because you want to do it.

That’s all I could think of while on the toilet.

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.

Mobile app development

Go outside