It is for their target audience. They’re not talking to you, they’re talking to their customers.

I can still see parts of the desktop. They should really go all in and add some more blank space to the sides of the menu.

I can’t even find a single positive comment on YouTube. Maybe there is still some hope for the games industry, when absolutely everyone is starting to reject the Gatcha/GaaS/MTX slopware.

They sadly advertise with an “AI” part, which, ew. But they seem good other than that.

That’s just what AMD calls their latest laptop CPU line. I don’t like the name either, but performance-wise they look really good from what I’ve seen.

are all of these laptops customisable in terms of OS?

I haven’t bought any of these laptops so far, I just looked into them because I was considering it. That said, all of them offer various Linux distros, Windows, or no OS at all. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to install whatever you want on them.

As for security I’m really not the person to ask. The way I see it, a computer is as secure as you make it. StarLabs shipping with coreboot out of the box does seem interesting though, if you want to go full tinfoil hat :)

Tuxedo (based in Germany) are Clevos. Slimbook (based in Spain) sells Clevo and maybe Tongfang, not sure.

StarLabs assembles their own laptops in the UK, but I think their parts are still Chinese/Taiwanese because where else are you going to buy laptop parts?

Personally I would not rule out buying Tuxedo/Slimbook just because the manufacturing is in Asia. Ultimately the components for any laptop will be sourced from there anyway and at least you get support from a European company.

From PLMs GitHub:

Plasma Login is in a prototype state and is not considered ready for real-world usage.

I just tried it out anyway, because SDDM sucks. PLM no longer uses the lowest common resolution for all displays and HDR works about as well as it does in plasma (sometimes I get a black screen and have to turn the display off and on). Still better than SDDM. It also integrates with KDEs system settings so it’s easy to setup.

Auto-login does not work however, so I’ll be sticking with SDDM for now, but I’m looking forward to the stable release.

Steam and Heroic already block sleep while a game is running. For everything else gamemoderun can be used, which also blocks sleep. It’s a nice fix but it’s not as big of a deal was it may seem.

Setting the homepage to about:blank is one of the first things I do when setting up a new browser. Everything I would want to do is accessible from the address bar, favorites or history so what’s the point of a homepage?

Not sure about Lenovo, but I would never consider an ASUS laptop after they have been found trying to scam people on warranty issues repeatedly.

Current summary of the Gamers Nexus investigation with links to related videos