Additional tarrifs were mostly struck down by the courts, a few months ago.

Looks like they're UK based. I don't know, but apparently tariffs etc are factored into the shipping fees shown on their site.

If you're not sure if you want to go Linux yet, it's probably best to try a live USB stick of a few distros on your existing hardware. Get a feel for what the interface is like, how things work, how it works on your hardware, etc, without actually changing anything. Seems like a better bet to me than buying all-new hardware.

Have you tried it out?

https://askubuntu.com/questions/629632/can-you-boot-ubuntu-s...

As the other commenter said, evaluate a live usb with any distribution with KDE Plasma Desktop, for example Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, or Endeavour OS (Arch Linux based). You can also try something like Fedora Kinoite or Bazzite, so called immutable distributions which make it really easy to use for non-technical people.

Check out System76 and Framework, they're based in the US and ship Linux machines.

Starlabs is older than framework and their machines are *at least" as repairable. I have been using a really good one for 4 years or so. And their firmware is open source.

Lol these are the most refined Linux flagship hardware manufacturers in the world. No clone.

A couple weeks ago, Framework livestreamed a rundown of their 13" laptop lasting over 20 hours on a charge. I can believe the 16" gets there too.

Light usage on low brightness? Nice to know it will last for a long flight.

I have no experience with cachyOS, so can't comment there, but I don't see the point in offering pre-installed Arch. I'd say most Arch users are fairly picky and opinionated about their setup, and would choose to reinstall anyway.