I'm running a very recent kernel in Fedora and have tried numerous power saving mechanisms (currently autocpufreq, although it's results are not much different from gnome PPD) and I'm lucky if I get 3 hours from the thing while running 10-15 FF tabs and a single instance of VSCode+Remote SSH extension. This is ~1/2 of what I can get in Windows.
I think a lot of Linux users would be surpised how good their battery life would be if they installed Windows on their laptops. It's not Linux's fault per se, it's just that there's considerably less engineering manpower going into tuning the power efficiency of laptop hardware on Linux. People get up in arms because they can't reconcile the fact that "Windows is bloated" with the fact that it gets better battery life, but if you think about it for a few seconds it really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Or any other "performance"-component for that matter, which typically requires proprietary software counterpart (drivers) to run efficiently. Most vendors only ship decent Windows drivers, and the Linux counterpart (if any) is considered "good enough".
I would not consider this the fault of kernel developers. Often there is basically nothing they can do. You just need to look at what hoops the Nouveau-devs have to jump through - colossal effort, little appreciation from users.
It all comes down to driver support. If you manufacturer doesn't have proper drivers, your experience will suck. It says a lot about Lenovo that open source Linux drivers work better than their proprietary ones, but that probably comes with the territory if you combine Intel and Nvidia.
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220901221720.1105021-1-joel@jo...
One thing I noticed almost immediately when running linux is that when I was just farting around learning the OS, the laptop would get stone cold. But when I did something large, like compile a kernel, while the laptop was actually on my lap I could physically feel the heat from the CPU start to leak through the case.
I find it much more damming that Apple smokes Windows in battery life even despite Microsoft having its own line of laptops (Surface) and having the money to pour into it vs Linux.
If you're on Gnome use "power saving" performance mode. Proprietary OSes throttle aggressively whereas Linux doesn't on "balanced" mode.
Linux is great
Not sure why this is getting downvoted
So now my battery is just a UPS. Which is actually kind of nice at times!
Now if only everything else worked flawlessly out of the box.
I like this in general, but $2400 + $100 shipping for an i7-12700H / 32GB DDR5 / 2TB 980 Pro / non-OLED display is a bit high. I'm personally waiting for this Vivobook Pro 16x to drop later this year: https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/vivobook/vivobook-...
- Ryzen 9 6900HX (8-core / 4.9Ghz) - RTX 3060 / 6GB GDDR6 - Choice between 4K/60 OLED or 3200x2000/120 OLED, both with >=550nits and TUV cert - 2x NVMe slots so 8TB max SSD? - 90whr battery - The current model is $1650 / free shipping on Amazon so expected pricing is the same as it replaces that model (current: M7600RE-XB99, new: M7601)
For $2400 you can get a ProArt Studiobook H5600QR-XB99 with Ryzen 9 5900HX | 64GB | 2TB | RTX 3070 or for $2200 (on sale right now) a Razer Blade 14 with 6900HX |RTX 3070 Ti| 14" QHD 165Hz | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 1TB, so those are what this is competing with, and those others come with Windows licenses too (it looks like the Vivobook MIGHT be available without an OS, but no word on what configurations offer that).
- 16" 3.2K 120 Hz OLED
Apparently part of the genius of the chip is that they baked a large chunk of the power management logic into the chip itself.
I think Linux has work it could do to be more efficient, but really we should just be mad at Intel/AMD for not doing what Apple did years ago. They never even offered an option for those willing to sacrifice compatibility. And now they're going to start looking the entire portable electronics market (little bit hyperbole, but I don't see my self buying any new computer that isn't an M1 something for a long time especially as Asahi Linux is making such good progress and I can use Linux on whatever Apple releases in the future).
[1]: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1592508953933778945?s=20...
I'll stick to second-hand thinkpads for now, but I'd really like to have a thinkpad with some ARM resembling M1.
We had a good shot with frame.work but it seems nobody is going to make other boards nor are keyboards really replaceable with thinkpad-like keyboards, so the swappable parts concept falls very short for now.
Or see what happens when you use Chrome or Firefox instead of Safari on a MacBook. One of these three vendors plainly cares a lot about battery life. The other two do not care as much.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsi...
By breaking background services more and more with every release. By doing less, your battery lasts longer, but for what if you want to make use of that battery? (I'm an Android user because iOS is simply not an option for tinkering, but I am sour about the breakage with every version.)
I don’t know, just the other day I saw someone warning against falling for M1/M2 for StableDiffusion inference(people buy new computers to run SD apparently!), claiming that same code take two orders of magnitude longer on M1/M2 against a 3080.
So maybe an M1/M2 Air isn’t faster than Intel(+NVIDIA) machine at TDP, maybe it’s magnificent that it’s only 100 times slower than a proper desktop, maybe it is still a lightweight ARM laptop, just (salivatingly) nice ones.
Apple tightly controls both software and hardware, and major Apple-provided software, such as Safari, is specifically optimized. Run Firefox on an M1, and see how much more battery it eats with the same tabs open.
Hence an Apple-only laptop has a spectacular battery life, which is reported. With real-world non-Apple software it could be a bit different, even though M1 CPU is really more energy-efficient than a mobile x86 CPU.
This is not touching the GPU anyway.
12700H has comparable single core performance and significantly faster multi core performance than M1.
It's seem to be about at the same level as M1 Pro/Ultra just with much poorer energy efficiency.
Also I'm not sure how mature performance/efficiency cores are supported on Linux right now.
Now I'm definitely spoiled by the Lenovo X1 series, but I'm not happy.
The hardware is a rebrand from clevo-computer.com - some minor spare parts can be had from there.
The system is VERY prone to overheating, the fan is noisy. They claim the fan noise is "not annoying" which is only true in the short term. I have opened up the bottom shell and I believe the fan recirculates a bit of hot air back into the case. This really is a limiting factor for me, I'm considering an alternate cooling solution.
The case had a minor chip in it within the first ten minutes out of the box (I don't know how that happened, I think it just pinged off by itself!). The palm-rests are starting to show dark spots. My barrel jack power connector is loose, I have to hold it in with a rubber band. (I still have the usb-c port) All the rubber feet at the bottom fell off quite some time ago, superglued them back on. The (super compact) PSU started to whine, that was replaced under warranty - but is stated to be a consumable item!
Out of the box they have their own OS, which is a somewhat modified Ubuntu. My main driver is Debian and almost everything worked right out of the box - sometimes I got back (usb-boot) to their distro to validate things (see: support).
The firmware is more than okay for me; I managed to cross-compile their "control centre" to allow me to change performance/fan characteristics on the fly. The uefi updates work fine (boot from a stick), but they are undocumented.
The support is ... rigid. The first response is to boot their own distro and kernel. This is fair for a mass market product I guess, but I somehow hoped that specific questions would find their way proper Linux Gurus (tm).
There is a very cute penguin instead of a windows logo on the keyboard :-)
While they still have a ways to go, I'm more hopeful for Framework since they do their own engineering, and I'm interested to see what system76 does in the self-designed laptop they're reportedly working on.
The AMD cpu model I'm using for work is really quite good on power and fast (Ryzen 7 5700u).
Sending a laptop back for warranty repair is a massive pain as well. I ended up just working around the broken stuff until I bought a new machine.
Linux will never be a mainstream option with these low effort products.
Why are so many Linux laptops NVIDIA? It know that we have the OS kernel + blob userspace option now, but it's still early days. My desktop is AMD, my laptop is NVIDIA, and the difference is night-and-day.
I would honestly have an IGPU in a laptop over NVIDIA, but even that option seems few and far between (this specific laptop being an exception).
Yes, this ad says this computer is thin, but if you compare it to a commodity ultrabook from dell/hp/apple, it looks much thicker.
- Who is actually producing these? Are they resellers? For whom?
- They mention TuxedoOS. Why? Can you have the same experience with a vanilla Debian or Arch?
- Customs costs. They may inflate the price quite a lot depending on where you are
- They only mention production in Germany. Their "Why Tuxedo" page[1] does seem to imply that they are building most of it themselves.
- They mention TuxedoOS for the same reason System76 mentions Pop_OS!: because they made it. I would expect it to work with any one of the OS included in their WebFAI[2] pretty well[3], which by the way I believe is actually sent with the laptop.
- Their FAQ might shed some light here[4] depending on where you live. It's pretty much the same with any brand I know; maybe you have had a different experience?
[1] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/why-TUXEDO.tuxedo#tuxedo-...
[2] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-WebFAI.tuxedo
[3] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Freque...
[4] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Freque...
AFAIK they only sell rebadged Clevo products. You should be able to get any of their laptops on https://clevo-computer.com/en/laptops-configurator/ just without the badge.
TuxedoOS was very limiting to me; a vanilla Debian works very well.
[G] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Freque...
The energy required to move 80kg (me+bike) 25km is significant.
Meanwhile, gaming rigs are coming with kilowatt power supplies now, maybe even more.
Laptops try to be more efficient, yeah, but 100 watt-hours in sixteen hours is 6.25 watts sustained.
Did I math that properly?
My Lenovo gaming laptop gets 5-6 hours with a 4th gen AMD H-series on a 60Wh battery.
The obvious is TSMC's "7nm" and iterative 6nm enables greater efficiency over "Intel 7." Beyond that, presumably there's some IPC advantage that means more work can be done with the same clocks and power draw.
It's odd, because 12th gen is quite performant and seems efficient, and yet somehow the battery life isn't very good.
I had the 9 Cell battery (compared to the 3 cell) with the additional backpack chassis battery that clipped on below.
Just by itself the 9 cell was good for close to 10 hours.
Extended battery was: 64.38Wh and the extended 9 cell was 94Wh.
About a decade down the road, I still have about 50% battery life left in it at max charge and it still holds its own on an all day outing
Though, to be fair, this one had an HDD originally and has an "HDAPS" system. It's a built in gyroscope that will park the head of the disk if it notices the laptop is in free fall. how silly and fantastic that is
The backside of this magazine is a full-page ad for this exact laptop.
[1]: " c't Make: Sonderheft Elektro-Technik " https://www.heise.de/select/make/2022/7
[2]: Seriously, 12,90€ for one edition is IMHO too much to just buy every single one without all the content being something I'm really interested in.
It's easy if you change the parameters.
24 Wh built-in with unlimited hot-swap 72 Wh batteries, pretty much 96 Wh + 72Wh * N.
Got anything constructive to add?
The speakers point DOWNWARDS!
They're supposed to be pointing upwards, towards where your ears are supposed to be.
The downwards pointing speakers are a good fit for 2 in 1 laptops, that transform into tablets, as the most common usage of those is to fold them over, therefore pointing the speakers towards yourself.
But not LAPtops. These either sit on a desk, directing the sound towards plywood, or if you use them in bed, or on top of a blanket (when not working and using it as a personal device), sound getting muffled by the fabric.
I've tested ones of the tuxedo laptops we bough a while back that has the same flaw. The sound muffling is not that big, but it is noticeable, compared to my HP laptop with speakers next to the screen above the keyboard. And of course, compared to a macbook, it sounds horrible.
Bad speaker placement and bad speaker quality. I guess it's OK for work purposes but if you want to use it as a personal device that you want to enjoy during your past time, you, just like me, will get frustrated.
Work gives me an elite book and while it’s much better than most, it’s still bad. The whole case resonates and adds noise and it runs some shitty software that uses 30% cpu to make it sound decent. Disabling that software brings it back to average laptop levels.
Coming from Macbook I'm pretty happy with it. I got used very fast with KDE (I used it on desktop computer in the recent years from time to time). Touchpad it's great, keyboard is the same as on Macbook. Battery lasts about 5h now when programming (some Node.JS, compiling some Rust or Go services).
I had a 2016 Macbook Pro 15 with I7 and 16gbRAM, now it compiles a Rust service I'm working on in 1 minute compared to 6 minutes on the old laptop.
The laptop specs I'm having is the same as the Tuxedo and the same chassis: i7-12700H, 16gb Ram(updated it to 40gb myself), 512gb NvMe, 99wh Battery.
Tongfangs tend to be quite a bit better than Clevo also.
45W - yes, minimum 35W but 45W much more likely in default settings.
But yes I would worry about cooling in a 14" form factor with an Intel "45W" CPU that supports a peak of 115W.
1.0 Megapixel webcam!
In this age of video calling that's hardly acceptable, it's an unfortunately huge downside to what seems like an otherwise great device.
Seriously, why don't laptop makers understand that a "workstation" needs a decent non-chicklet keyboard?
Ordered today actually. I've been torn between getting a 14" vs 16", since I am also replacing an old xps 15. But the extended battery life of the 14" is what finally convinced me.
The Starlab Starfighter also looks great, but I need a replacement laptop this year preferably.
Glue-on anti-glare films exist, but they are finicky to apply.
That’s what’s setting the glass ceiling here to 99Wh.
