It's sadly impossible.

Even if you smugly purchase a laptop from an Asian manufacturer (or spend a LOT of money on one from one of the few European manufacturers who are very expensive), you'll still have to use an Inte, AMD Or Qualcomm CPU.

You will almost certainly have components made by Western Digital, Seagate or Micron, Nvidia etc.

So it's essentially impossible right now until and unless holistic European alternatives arrive and that would take decades.

Then you can decide to use Linux, of which most distributions are developed and maintained in the US.

You'll feel good at first, until you realise it's not as intuitive as what you're used to. You'll look for ways to make it behave more Windows or Mac-like. You'll gleefully install LibreOffice. And it will generally work. But you'll get irritated at it being like a 15 year old version of office, and the compatibility just not being quite 100%.

You then realise you need to change your email account away from Gmail or Hotmail or whatever American solution you've been using for years. The European ones offer clunky web interfaces and you will somehow need to adjust your email address on all the things you've signed up for and forgotten the password. You can then do a password reset with MFA on your iPhone or Android (American) phone. Unless you've been super diligent and bought a Nothing phone - a UK smartphone! Running on American Qualcomm snapdragon processors of course.

You will happily try using Vivaldi or Opera until you discover that many of your most used web applications are optimised for Firefox and Chrome, both American, and sometimes just will not work. If they do work, you'll be using an application running on MS Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, using various modules served up by those companies, and using Cloudflare (American) for protection.

And eventually you'll give it up and buy a Windows laptop or a Mac.

It's very sad to say. I've honestly looked into the possibility of obtaining a European only laptop or NUC, installing Linux and seeing if I can survive with a European only (or even non American) ecosystem, but we have a lot of work to do to be able to achieve that I'm afraid

Posted By: Legacy Fan on January 27th 2026 at 16:14:27

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