Razer's Linux Laptop Plans Appear To Have Been Mothballed

[toastal]

Typing from a 2016 Razer Blade on Arch, I can tell you the build quality is still solid and the specs are great for my developer/creator workflows even now. The problem for me is that BIOS upgrades require Windows 10 specifically because Razer wants a snake logo GUI for something that should be at least runnable via FreeDOS or WindowPE. So now I'm still vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown all because there's shortsightedly no alternative way to upgrade the BIOS. I know there was a BIOS upgrade a version or two ago to fix the trackpad, but imagine if you couldn't patch that...

Razer's also declined to support the free firmware hosting provided by LVFS, which would help remedy this situation. It's like the bare minimum Linux support they could do -- but they don't.

I still e-mail them every quarter or so asking if the latest version is going to support BIOS upgrades without an OS, and I get the same tired response of 'We only support Windows 10', as if that has anything to do with BIOS. Eventually this laptop will break and I'll need something else in a small, rigid form factor with good specs, but that's very niche.

[toastal]

Those obnoxious lights are the reason I don't own a Razer laptop.

The body looks all nice, businessy and professional with its matte black coating and clean design. And then they had to go ruin everything with the ridiculous rainbow keyboard backlight.

The LEDs are configurable. You can set them all to white or grey if you want that experience you're mentioning. `razercommander` on Linux can even let you change it without booting to Windows. You can't realistically use colors like the demos because of how distracting it is, but it shows you what you can do. There's even a cute, clever project on Github that changes the colors based on which Vim mode you're in, whether it's normal, insert, visual, etc.