My lenovo + ubuntu combo is pretty neat
I loved my lenovo laptop. My sister had the exact same laptop and both of our laptops hinges broke. The metal hinges are to strong for the plastic chassis and eventually snaps it. So when you open the laptop, the bottom splits open in half. The performance and keyboard and screen were great. But the hinges are utterly fucked. I looked online and it seems to be a common problem. But they were not willing to repair it without having to pay like half the price of the actual laptop…
Which model?
Same, but openSUSE.
“finally” as if system 76 doesn’t already exist.
System 76 is on another continent though.
Novacustom
Another continent from Germany, yes another continet from you, probably but unfortunately for me I live in the same shithole country as system 76. that being said the hardware is all made over on that side of the pond anyway since they are just rebranded Cleavo / Sager hardware anyway.
The Clevo OEM laptops that make up most of System76 laptop offerings are getting worse and louder over time. I’ve had two successive Oryx pros that both had persistent hardware issues that outlasted my warranty coverage, the 2nd of which was simply producing more heat than 3 air cooled heat pipes could ever hope to account for. I know why they stopped selling that particular model of Oryx something like 3 months before the next one was available.
Fwiw, the Infinity Book Pro 14 in the review is also from Clevo. The author does praise Tuxedo’s tight integration of their flavour of Linux to the HW, so perhaps this is ahead of S76. No dog in this fight as I’m neutral on both companies, I like PopOS but have never bought a laptop from either
Yeah its a shame they aren’t better manufacturers out there for this sort of market. Even first party hardware seems pretty trash these days long gone are the days when a boutique PC manufacturer would go out of their way to make something that stands out. Falcon Northwest is the last holdout I know of and even they are nothing like they used to be.
Framework’s doing a pretty good job standing out for laptops anyways, with their user-repairability focus.
i think system 76 is x86_64 not arm?
Most everything is x86. The above laptop uses an AMD 8845HS with DDR5 SODIMMs. Pretty standard.
The exception is Apple. And some Qualcomm Windows laptops that… are kinda unremarkable.
TBH the only interesting hardware in this space right now are the AMD Strix Halo laptops (which are Linux friendly M4 Pro/Max analogues), and the Steam Deck’s economical, more specialized chip. Someone could try to stuff an ARM Nvidia GB10 (the thing in Nvidia Digits) in a laptop frame, but it would cost a fortune.
Why would you want an arm laptop? (legit question, not trying to be a dick) Compatibility is already going to be questionable since its running linux, adding a low power mobile focused processor would make it such a niche product it would be all but useless outside of web apps or bespoke software meant just for ARM PC’s (of which are very few).
Also System 76 does arm as well https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1-n1/configure
They are very purpose built because ARM is not the best at general purpose PC use so it’s generally only used in PC’s when specifically needed or asked for.
I’ve had so many different laptops over the past ~10 years ranging from Dell, ThinkPad, System76, Asus, and now a newer MacBook. I’ve used Windows, Linux, and Mac OS as a daily driver OS. The only Arm chip I’ve had is my current MacBook, but to answer your question, its power efficiency is unmatched compared to anything else I’ve ever had… resulting in crazy battery life as well as a device that doesn’t try to melt a hole through my lap whenever I try and do something even remotely taxing on it.
The efficiency had better be good that’s specifically what the RISC (arm stands for Advanced RISC Machine) architecture was designed for but that’s also why its terrible for general purpose. ARM is also proprietary which always stifles progress because of licensing (greed). It’s one of the reasons that RISC-V is becoming popular despite being less efficient.
This is kinda a myth. ARM is fine for HPC or desktop use (hence there have been very high power ARM designs like Fujitsu A64FX, Ampere Altra or the European Rhea), x86 is fine for low power, it’s just more about how the specific chip is tuned for power/raw performance/price.
Apple seems very good (partially) because they pay top dollar for power efficiency and a cutting edge low power process. Most x86 laptop chips make more significant cost tradeoffs, with cheaper dies, higher clocks, more aggressive power curves and so on.
It’s not though, ARM themselves admit it. https://www.arm.com/glossary/risc.
“With RISC, a central processing unit (CPU) implements the processor design principle of simplified instructions that can do less but can execute more rapidly.”
None of this is to say RISC or by extension ARM is bad, just that where everything currently is it’s not a good choice for everyday computing. By design its as light weight and simple as possible so that it can perform its specific function faster and more efficiently with less overhead than a more general purpose processor.
Geeks for geeks has a good writeup on it.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/computer-organization-risc-and-cisc/
Laptops run off batteries a lot of the time - so compromising outright performance - full instruction set - for battery life will be attractive for many laptop users who use it on the go.
I’m no apple fanatic, I’d never get one, but I do see the appeal of those apple laptops.
I’m sure x86 could get closer on the performance to battery tradeoff if they wanted to; but I bet they’d be looking to price up at the apple level for that.
Just to add - a rather large reason the technology we have today even exists is thanks in no small part to the x86 architecture and it’s immense backwards-compatibility.
I mean, that doesn’t mean much.
The Fujitsu A64FX had full 512-bit SVE, with 2x 512-bit units per core and HBM memory, which is as CISC as it gets. IIRC was the “widest” CPU that could get the most done per clock, at the time, and the US Department of Energy seemed to love them.
And then you have tiny cores like Intel’s in order ones that are way thinner than ARM designs.
Reality is decoding doesn’t take up much die space these days and stuff is decoded into micro ops anyway. The ISA has an effect, but efficiency/appropriateness for different platforms comes down to design and business decisions more than the ISA.
Modern mobile processors are extremely powerful, and way more power efficient than desktop chips. Many Linux distros have ARM variants.
And (AFAIK) it’s mostly because they are tuned for that, whereas laptop processors outside Apple have some overzealous boosting configs/clocks these days.
You are not wrong though. Developing and supporting them (as a company) would be very labor intense, so no one really wants to make that jump beyond Qualcomm/windows.
I think that is the biggest issue with ARM. x86 is so wide spread and backwards compatible that it’s just more cost effective to eat the efficiency losses. If Arm ever gets as big as x86 I can see it dominating all but maybe the Gaming PC space. Proton compatibility layer is already compatible with it however so it might even take off there one day as well.
It just needs a platform desktop users want to buy. There isn’t one (as Qualcomm and Altera aren’t very appealing TBH), and there probably won’t be since Nvidia/AMD/Intel are so far ahead in graphics.
Once that happens though (say AMD starts releasing ARM CCDs?), the switch will not be as hard as you’d think.
I agree, maybe my wording was confusing but yeah I see the biggest problem for ARM is market penetration. Functionally it’s there already but since so few use it no one is making anything for it and since no one is making anything for it no one uses it.
Yeah exactly!
I will say, I remember a little ARM/x86 assembly, and I think ARM SVE2 and some other bits about the ISA are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Backwards compatibility, going forward from ArmV9, is so much better, if that makes any sense, and the same compile binary should “scale” to huge and tiny cores really well (whereas a lot of x86 assumes you’re running something ancient, and AVX is a total mess).
Hey, I just got this Laptop for my new job after using an X230 and Retina MacBook Pro for years, nice to see it on Lemmy!
The display, case, trackpad and Linux support is top notch. The keyboard layout is a little weird though. Would anyone be interested in a longer review on my blog?
I would love to see a longer review from the perspective of a long time MacBook Pro user. So yes please!
Who changes resolution away from the screen’s native values instead of changing the DPI values?
And they switched to a resolution one that can’t even Integer-scale, and, even worse, isn’t even the correct aspect ratio.
Personally, I’ve seen a few people doing similar things, and to me it’s always an indicator that the person needs to get their eyes checked. Any person with good eye sight or well adjusted glasses should immediately notice that the text actually becomes blurrier and harder to read despite the increased text size.
What’s the current state of Linux support for high dpi screens? As of two years ago I had some issues with getting things to work right in KDE, especially with GTK apps, by manually fiddling with system font sizes and button sizes, before I ended up donating that laptop to someone else.
I still run a fairly old dell laptop with 4k screen, and fedora 41.
My experience is that i needed to set dpi, scaling, and font sizes separately for kde and gnome apps, Firefox is a story in itself, and one app that I quickly stopped using - partly because I could never get it to listen to dpi settings no matter what I did - well, I recently learned that it could be used on a 4k monitor if one first were to set the right environmental variable. Tough luck, I already went with a replacement app.
Right now I only have one app that needs further custom tweaking to be legible, but since that’s only running in the background anyway, I haven’t bothered. So in short, for most apps it’s possible to configure them, but it is a pain point.
Will not buy another 4k laptop.
Yeah, Firefox in particular gave me the most issues.
Configuring each app separately is also annoying.
And I definitely never got things to work on an external monitor that was a different DPI from my laptop screen. I wish I had the time or expertise to be able to contribute, but in the meantime I’m left hoping that the Wayland and DE devs find a solution to be at least achieve feature parity with Windows or MacOS.
1440p screen with x11 and wayland works just fine on KDE. Wayland is much better and more performant. Not sure about even higher res.
No clue. I always used very old 1080p (or less) screens. I guess I was just lucky that way 🤣
I mean, that’s basically the author’s problem, then. I suspect the software support just isn’t there for the hardware that ships on this particular laptop, to where it’s easiest to manually put it in some blurry non native resolution, as the least crappy solution.
Maybe they are still using an old school (X11?) DE?
echo “Xft.dpi: 210” >> ~/.Xresources
God, I wish I were in the market for this. I have a baseline m1 Macbook Air and a lack of funds, so I can’t quite justify another laptop. And while Asahi Linux is very cool, going forward I really want to support good Linux-friendly vendors.
It looks like this is just another rebranded Cleavo/Sager laptop anyway, it wasn’t purpose built to be a linux machine.
The 15 inch version comes with a 100 Wh battery, which is a rare find.
