I've been wanting to find an alternative to Thinkpads since Lenovo bought them, but despite them not being what they used to be, I just haven't been happy with any alternatives. I'm hopeful for Framework improving on their modularity, and the System76 in-house design that's in the works has me intrigued.
Right now I'm looking forward to their eventual redesign of the Z series. I doubt they'll do it, but I'd love a light workstation class version of the Z16, with slightly higher end graphics, and a vapor chamber. I'm also hopeful that they work on Linux support for their ARM offerings, and bring back the X13s that they offered with Snapdragon 8 a couple years back.
Unfortunately, they have minimal support for US frequencies. The US market is dominated by disgustingly expensive flagships, and severely compromised midrange and budget offerings.
The cool thing about Bazzite is, you can run their Arch container in Distrobox on any distro you prefer. I just have to run it with Podman, games load super slow using Docker.
I'm really looking forward to having sane functionality without needing a dozen extensions, and still have a couple things I just can't quite reconcile. I tried to like Plasma, but once again, I just can't stand using it for more than a month or two. And I don't have time to get a more basic compositor working the way I want, like I did back in the Fluxbox/Openbox days, especially with how complex things have become.
I'm pretty sure they're just treading water this year, and focusing on their in-house design for the Tensor G5 in 2025. Hopefully it doesn't break Graphene support.
I think they meant build as in configure your environment, not build as in from source. If that's the case, they're not exactly wrong. But once you get the bulk of it to your liking, it's mostly fun little tweaks and accidents. It's just a lot at first.
There's a very good chance the key is stored in the EFI, making this the absolute easiest part. I'd just make sure to get the Windows installer on a USB stick before installing Linux, if there aren't any other Windows machines around. And also make sure I have a wifi/ethernet driver available before reinstalling Windows, if it comes to that. It can be tricky to install Windows without network, these days, and even if you get past that (which I'd recommend, to bypass a Microsoft account), you still need it once you're in the installed OS.
Yeah, I played with Silverblue for the first time a week or two ago, when I decided to move back to Gnome from Plasma. When I realized that I'd need to layer adw-dark to get rid of the light settings panel in Gnome Console, and then layer in aptx and ldac support, and then some drivers for hardware accel in Firefox... I came to undestand that truly approaching this as minimally layering, and instead properly relying on flatpak and toolbx/distrobox wasn't going to work out. Instead I'm just going to get anxious every time I have to say, 'well fuck, I guess I have to layer this too.'
That and I really don't like the mess of a filesystem. So back to Arch, with some things learned to keep stuff I don't like out of my base system. I can use a Bazzite-Arch container for Steam, to avoid having to enable multilib, for example. Well, if I can figure out the performance issues, anyway. And I know I'm weird, but I'd kind of like to avoid using AUR on my base system, and Flatpak kind of terrifies me for the reasons you mentioned
I do look forward to an immutable future, but I don't think it's going to make me happy for some time. Maybe Nix or GUIX, but that sounds like a winter project. I know some folks use an Arch base with Nix layered on top, but that rather sounds like the inverse of what I'd ideally want. It seems like the beauty of Nix is that you don't have to worry about layering, because YOU declare the base?
It's rumored Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal for Windows on ARM that's expiring in 2025. Supposedly, Nvidia and AMD both have chips being prepared for that.
Microsoft is very much trying to push ARM forward, in order to compete with heat, noise, and battery life of Apple laptops and tablets.
This isn't a phone focused product, and the thermal envelope is quite a bit larger. It's meant for laptops, and maybe some tablets will see it. These are Oryon cores from their purchase of Nuvia, and I don't think a whole lot will transfer over.
I have a Nuphy Halo 75 that I'm rather thrilled with. I have a 65% and TKL Leopolds, with Topre and Cherry Clears respectively, that I also love. But I wanted to go wireless, and I wanted RF instead of Bluetooth. I also wanted a happy medium 75%, and the Nuphy checked all those boxes.
I got baby kangaroo switches, as I love tactiles, and I really enjoy them.
A couple caveats:
The v1 uses a proprietary tool for programming the layout. The v2 uses QMK/VIA, but the 65 isn't available in v2 yet.
The keycaps are kinda meh. Coming from a Leopold, which has very nice textured PBT keycaps, I knew I wouldn't be happy. I ordered some Osume keycaps, and they greatly improve the quality of the experience.
I was considering a Keychron, but just got the feeling that the QC may be a bit lacking compared to Nuphy. I can't back that up, and have no idea if it's true, it's just the feeling I got from reading reviews.
I also considered a Zoom75, but haven't had the time for a first build, and availability wasn't great.
Do you need wireless? Do you need it to be programmable? If the answer to both of those is no, I'd definitely recommend Leopold. They do have some bluetooth boards now, but my experience with bluetooth input devices hasn't been great.
Varmillo is another one to look into, with the VXT67 in particular looking interesting. That glintstone colorway is gorgeous.
Not to mention car insurance pricing.