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The most interesting thing about this laptop to me is the keyboard.

After delving into QMK and ortholinear 40% boards, I've dreamed a lot about a laptop that integrates these.

This Balthazar laptop and the MNT Pocket Reform[0] are both exciting prospects in that regard. I hope both make it to production.

[0] https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-06-20-introducing-mnt...

The keyboard layout they picked is super weird. I'm on a split board and am pretty familiar with them and split style one piece boards. Rather than making it symmetrical they made the 6 row super low. The worst is the bottom row. Two small buttons means you better hope your hands rest in the right place.

I'm all for alternative keyboards but this one is not great.

FWIW I prefer the one on the MNT Pocket Reform more. Both are OSHW, so making a corrected layout should be feasible.
Title has a typo, should be "RISC-V", not "Risk-V".
You are totally correct. I just copied it from the Tom's Hardware article[1] about the project where this error appears to have existed at some point in time (it still appears in the cache of my RSS reader[2]).

[1]https://www.tomshardware.com/news/risc-v-laptop-easy-to-buil... [2]https://imgur.com/a/dPgMLYm

maybe it's not a typo
Apart from the information given on the landing page:

> Balthazar is an international consortium that sets in motion and leads a new approach in the design and the construction of a full CERN Open Hardware Licence and GNU-GPL compliant FOSS laptop as a personal computing device.

> It is a minor part of an effort to revive and accelerate EU integrated circuits and electronics industry.

> Personal Computing Device will contain all the hardware and innovative software features and new set of precautions to prevent any 3rd party intrusion into the system.

> The consortium consists of an industry and academia personae, and it is applied for a Common Conservancy status for the further preservation of the project.

What kind of risk are you referring to?

What OSes can I run on a Risc-V laptop?
Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku, XV6 are some OSs that have been ported to the RISC-V ISA.

How much support and how good would depend on the SoC, but as far as Linux goes, it's all up to the kernel, thus you can run any distribution if you use a kernel that works.

Ideally, that's gonna be Linux upstream. Typically (until upstreaming happens), it is gonna be some LTS with patches.