They say nothing about their distro having no upstream. If they make a distro based of Debian/Arch/Fedora I don't see that as dismissing their efforts anymore than Nobara/SteamOS/Ubuntu/Mint does.
I rather they enforce their requirements on their own spin then try to force existing distros to implement said reqs. They should obviously donate to the foss community when using the technology the community maintain though!
EU is behind the restrictions for vaping liquids, not Sweden. :)
https://health.ec.europa.eu/tobacco/product-regulation/electronic-cigarettes_en
Yeah, they had started limiting what you could buy in Sweden as well. My last time mixing I bought a silly amount of 18mg/ml 10ml strong menthol bottles and large 70/30 PG/VG bottles and ended up with my own 3mg/ml mixture that still tasted menthol, although not as overwhelmingly so.
I think part of it is something else - ease of use and ease of access.
The "world that makes sense" product exists already:
https://www.elementvape.com/box-mod-kits
While I was vaping I mixed my own liquids though, as the cost savings was immense and I could easily lower the nicotine mg/ml on my own until I quit it altogether.
Yeah, if there's a full system failure without any backups and no option to get the system operational again then I would land in clone the drives before trying to restore data from them.
If the leaks are correct we're talking about 120W TDP and higher power and thermal efficiency than the 7000 series of X3D CPUs.
L2 8MB, L3 96MB(32MB + 64MB) for a total of 104MB according to Toms Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/extensive-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-specs-leak-details-unlocked-120w-cpu-with-5-2-ghz-boost-clock
Priority one for me is that the motherboard allows for BIOS Firmware updates from a USB drive without having to boot an operating system. The user manual is usually the fastest way to verify that one.
Then I would look at PCIe slots, if I bought a new motherboard today I would want to have at least one PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and one PCIe 5.0 m.2 slot.
Oh, and searching the net for people having trouble with the motherboards networking or bluetooth when running linux distros is always a good idea.
CPU
Some games benefit a lot from the large L3 cache in the X3D cpus, f.e. the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Check whether it is true for the ones you play.
GPU
I'm running an AMD 6650XT GPU in Linux without any trouble, I even use vfio to use it in a Fedora VM without errors.
RAM
Buying 2x32GB gives you enough RAM to run a bunch of VMs while gaming. 2x16GB is more than enough for a gaming rig.
I'd look at wireguard / tailscale / headscale and hide your services behind a vpn