Hello fellas,

I'm looking to buy a new laptop for office/programming work and entertainment up to mid-range games for a while. I had Intel/NVIDIA on my desktop and have Intel in my current laptop and I'd love to try out a laptop with AMD CPU and GPU before I get my next desktop. I'm thinking about running some arch-based distro or falling back to something like Pop_OS! if it doesn't go well. Honestly, I'm entirely unexperienced in choosing hardware and I would deeply appreciate any guidance.

I've read through comments for some laptop manufacturers including Lenvo, Asus, MSI, Acer, MSI, etc. and there doesn't appear to be any concensus. Apparently all of the hardware, manufacturing quality, customer service, etc. has entirely gone to shit at every company. I'm looking for a qwertz keyboard layout and shipping from within Germany so companies like system76 and framework 16 are a bit difficult.

My biggest question is about AMD laptop GPUs. Sometimes the shops just say "Radeon Graphics" or something like "780M" but I assume those are integrated graphics (?) and the ones I'm actually looking for are listed on here. Shops usually don't have a filter for those though, so I'm having a hard time finding them. The steam deck has an AMD APU listed but I haven't seen that in any shops as an option and doesn't appear to support ROCm.

As far as I can tell what I'm looking for are "AMD advantage laptops" but the only ones available in Germany I can find are

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14

• AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS
• AMD Radeon RX 6700S

ASUS TUF Gaming A16

• AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS
• AMD Radeon RX 7600S

MSI Delta 15

• AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX
• AMD Radeon RX 6700M

They're only available without configuration options like 32 instead of 16 GB RAM or without Windows, secondary drive, etc. Is this it? There appear to be a billion options for laptops with NVIDIA GPUs. Is this a silly experiment of mine and I should give up? Or are the above listed viable options?

Any insights are appreciated!

In the Ryzen 7000 series, so far, there's not a single 7440U-based laptop. The 7540U laptops are also not available, maybe except for the HP Pavillion Plus 14". There's also Framework, but it isn't available everywhere in the world. The new Thinkpad E14 Gen 6 and E16 Gen 2 (AMD) came out, and I've been so disappointed by their choice of upgrading from 7030 to 7035, and not the 7040. Similar story for other manufacturers.

In the Ryzen 8000 series, there's news of a few 8040 devices out from Acer, Asus, and a few other competitors - mostly in the form of heavy workstation and gaming laptop form-factor. Again, they're too expensive, and not available all around the world. Again, no news about the cheaper 8440U and 8540U.

So far, there's not any good budget, business-and-programming-specific modular, light-weight devices in 7040/8040 series. Devices that usually pair with an iGPU, have decently thin build and can be repaired. The only exception here is the Framework laptop, that's it.

The Thinkpad E14 Gen 6 and E16 Gen 2 Intel edition released earlier, is also twice as expensive as the AMD version, and rightfully, with the latest tech - this applies not just to Lenovo, but also other manufacturers, where they provide AMD's budget-friendly faux-7000.

What is wrong with the market not catering to modern, budget-friendly laptop with the latest Zen 4/RDNA3 combo?