For my work PC I followed the advice of an article someone posted on here and turned off transparency and animations in the accessibility settings. It really makes a difference.

Maybe I overestimated how widespread support for alternatives is. The problem seems to be to be that while most apps will support an alternative, no single format is supported everywhere (xkcd). According to another comment US messaging apps don’t support any alternatives, which is enough to keep GIF alive on its own.

I wasn’t even aware of APNG or AVIF before this thread. Webm was just the first alternative for GIFs that came to mind.

Looking at this APNG also seems to result in pretty large files whereas AVIF appears to have by far the best compression.

AVIF looks like the best alternative for sending short meme clips to people, which I assume is most peoples use case for GIFs.

Discord, Signal and Whatsapp all let you send any video format I’ve ever tried. I presume the same is true for Messenger and whatever else people use to communicate nowadays. I genuinely can’t think of anything that would support GIF but not various video formats.

Yes? I don’t really understand the question.

Please stop making gifs at all. It’s a terrible format that creates massive files that look like shit.

Webm is supported almost everywhere now and manages better quality at higher framerates and smaller file sizes.

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.

I’ve never used bcachefs so no help from me there.

/boot/efi is no longer considered an appropriate mount point

It’s not typical, but it should still work. systemd-boot even looks for the ESP there by default among /boot and /efi
Personally I use /efi.

just create a EFI partition and mount it /efi and let the OS put /boot inside the root partition if it needs it., then throw a UKI on /boot/efi/EFI/Linux

If I’m reading this correctly you mounted the ESP to /efi and then put the UKI in /boot/efi anyway. It needs to be on the ESP.
My /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset looks like this, if it helps. If you were to use /boot/efi for the ESP you would have to change the paths here.

# mkinitcpio preset file for the 'linux' package

#ALL_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
ALL_kver="/boot/vmlinuz-linux"

PRESETS=('default' 'fallback')

#default_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
#default_image="/boot/initramfs-linux.img"
default_uki="/efi/EFI/Linux/arch-linux.efi"
#default_options="--splash /usr/share/systemd/bootctl/splash-arch.bmp"

#fallback_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
#fallback_image="/boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img"
fallback_uki="/efi/EFI/Linux/arch-linux-fallback.efi"
fallback_options="-S autodetect"

its possible that UKI, systemd-boot, bcachefs, and the /efi mountpoint are not a great mix

I don’t see the point of systemd-boot with UKIs. All it does is chain-load the EFI boot stub in the UKI anyway. I just used efibootmgr to create an entry in the UEFI which boots the UKI directly.