Since you're in Canada,
@B S Magnet might be able to help you on that, at least the latter concern. Though, honestly, a 14 or 15 inch laptop really isn't a huge space suck, mine is pretty comfortable even in the probably 30 square foot side room of my grandma's house.
If you’re in a city like Winnipeg, Sk’toon or Regina,
@Kitsune86 , you might try check to see whether Bunz (a Canada-only trading/barter exchange site) is up and running locally. Also, I’ve been told another place to look locally for old Macs is FB marketplace (I’ve never joined FB, so I can’t vouch for or attest to its utility). Also, if there are any Value Villages or Goodwills or Sally Anns in your town, those can also be a place to find old Macs (I’ve found at least one iBook this way for, like $35). And come May, keep an eye out for relatively nearby yard sales.
Most importantly if you’re looking for something cheap or even free to tinker on and explore, the key is to have patience and persistence — namely, keeping an ear open and checking in regularly for stuff which shows up for trade or sale or, again, even free. Even in unlikely places like eBay, I’ve managed to find Canadian-origin used PowerBooks for cheap (and is how I happened upon my $25 A1138, which came to, like, $40 with shipping, and originated in Kelowna, while my $65 A1139, also about $15 in shipping, came from Scarborough).
Another thing is try not to expect a specific Mac model to turn up: you’ll frustrate yourself whilst waiting. Just see what comes up locally, and if it’s something right for you (like, will it run what you want to run?) and something you can transport (or have transported) easily to your place for a good price, then get that one.
10.2 Jaguar is generally considered the best of the original trilogy as it were, and it runs on a wider range of hardware. 10.3 Panther is even faster, but it's also much more modern. 10.0 Cheetah is a complete waste of time besides historical curiosity.
Mac OS 8.6 also runs Classilla, and is often considered faster, so it might be a good option regardless of either emulation or hardware.
10.4 and 10.5 aren't really "retro" in any way. Especially not in web browsing, they both have HTML5 capable web browsers (InterWebPPC and Leopard WebKit), so if you're looking to test compatibility they'd be probably a footnote for thoroughness.
Panther is a transitional OS X build and kind of a curiosity in of itself, though having used it back then, prior to Tiger existing, I don’t really miss it. I mean, it’s fairly stable and quick on older hardware, but what one can do with it now is fairly constrained, at least relative to Tiger. Tiger, meanwhile, is probably the most versatile OS X build for earlier G3 and G4 Macs, and for the fastest of the PowerPC Macs (and with a decent GPU), Leopard can be a big step forward from there. I’m still using G3, G4, and G5 Macs at home which I’ve had for up to 15 years, and they still do well with what they’re designed to do — no “retrocomputing” involved.
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