Is arch Linux now the “new” free/federated version?

Not sure to understand the question. There are many non-corporate owned distributions, starting with Debian, not just Arch.

And on what non-US laptop can I run it?

Any non-US laptop is supposed to run just fine. One needs to set the correct locale (generally it will be the first question asked by the install assistant: what country are you in and what keyboard layout do you want to use)?

I run Mint and prior to it I was running Debian (and prior to that it was Arch) on my French Azerty layout laptop without any issue (the same with the desktop and it's azerty keyboard)

The only potential issue will be disk encryption at boot but I can say it works flawlessly with Mint (and did so with Debian too, as far as I can remember)