I think these ARM chips are more expensive than we realize! Apple's egregiously high upgrade pricing on MacBooks sucks, and 8gb of RAM by default on the base model sucks as well, but it is likely to raise the average sale price of devices equipped with their chips. This has been known for some time, I feel.
I'll cut Samsung some slack since we don't know the unit cost of the Snapdragon chips, and they aren't likely to sell out of these devices right away even with competitive pricing because of the state of Windows on ARM. I'm excited to see how Linux support pans out on the next generation of non-Apple ARM notebooks, though; I think this is a chance for some manufacturers to take Linux more seriously, as Linux on ARM is actually not a terrible experience.
Mostly positive. My encoding utility Aviator can be shipped with a custom community-backed SVT-AV1 fork in the background without anyone noticing any issues like they would if I linked to system SVT-AV1. Flatpak makes this kind of thing easy, and users don't have to think about it.
I'm all for this change, but hopefully it means Mozilla will put some more energy into Gecko to make it competitive with WebKit in speed and multimedia capability (P3 colors, HDR images, JPEG-XL, etc)
FYI, the Pixel 8's processor is certainly less efficient than the S23's. If it is reportedly getting better battery life, that's likely software related.
I agree with this the most. People obsess over the start menu paradigm simply because they like it in Windows. I desire more open mindedness when it comes to looking into alternative ways to interact with your computer, so I align with GNOME.
I see a lot of Framework recommendations, and I had the 12th gen Framework for around a year running Fedora. I faced a bunch of excessive power use issues, and had to add some kernel flags just to get maybe 4 hours of battery life. The device is notoriously repairable, but the one thing that conked out on me was actually the mainboard, which was like the price of a new device. Support spent two weeks trying to find out if it was anything else before sending me a replacement mainboard.
My friend recently got a Zenbook 14 OLED with the same processor. The entire device was $200 cheaper lightly used than the Frameworks mainboard alone, and the only issue is the speakers don't work. That being said, he gets almost double my battery life, and a 90hz OLED screen on top of it all. Plus more ports; even with Framework's modular add-in cards I don't feel it is as flexible a system as having >4 useful ports.
My time with the Framework was great, but I wouldn't recommend it. Getting something secondhand is an environmentally conscious option, and you can get great stuff secondhand.
Well, that's for you to decide.