It's interesting to compare to the their Intel Infinity Book Pro Gen8 offering - that has a DDR5 SODIMMs, 99Wh battery, and is actually slightly lighter than the Pulse (also a brighter 400nit vs 300nit display), although you give up 1 M.2 SSD slot, it's 40% more expensive, and even with the much larger capacity runtime and performance is about the same or worse, since Intel.
Another good option for current-gen (7040) Ryzen ultra-portable Linux laptops is the Framework 13. A little pricier, 1 x M.2, but you get 2 x DDR5 SODIMMs, a 400nit+ display, and Framework has made good on their upgrade promises (this is their 4th drop-in replacement motherboard that runs in the same chassis and it seems like they're going to keep going). It has a very active Linux user community on their forums as well.
I am typing all the time in us alt international on various physical keyboards that have printed buttons in spanish qwerty, swiss french qwertz and plain ansi us keyboards. It is only a problem for those that have very little experience/use of the keyboard.
The thread will argue it, and they are welcome to, but you want what you want. :)
I remember seeing this project years ago when I tried to reverse engineer my own laptop's fan control functions.
https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-control-center
I actually tried to make it work on my laptop back then. Didn't succeed unfortunately.
I'd really enjoy reading about how they figured out the power management and fan control stuff. I couldn't figure it out. Did they have to reverse engineer? As a manufacturer, do they have access to documentation? I emailed Clevo asking for documentation and they didn't send me anything helpful.
As the name wrongly imply, it is not just about controlling the keyboard. At least on my laptop (an aura15 gen 2), a whole chunk of the control center is not available when the module is not loaded. Not sure if it will help but you might want to look into this module as well for your investigation.
It's weird. There's all this Clevo ACPI/WMI stuff in those headers but when I dumped my laptop's DSDT tables there was nothing like that. I found some WMI code in there, ran them through a decompiler I found in a GitHub repository and just got back some empty stub code. I still feel disappointed about it.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DSDT
It's really cool that they added sysfs LED controls. I remember looking into that as well. I was planning to send USB LED driver to the kernel but while reading kernel dricer source code and mailing lists to learn how to do it I came across comments saying they prefer to keep stuff in user space whenever possible.
This is my driver in case anyone's interested:
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
I just remembered something else. They used to be on bitbucket instead of github. In 2018 I messaged them there.
https://bitbucket.org/tuxedocomputers/clevo-xsm-wmi/issues/4...
They asked me to email them. I did and they actually sent me the control center software before they released it and also some details about how they were interfacing with the laptop's embedded controller. I still have those emails, they were very helpful. Very nice company and people.
It's been a while since I was tempted to buy a laptop (granted I don't really look), but this configuration and price seems pretty great.
At a few months old, the laptop (a Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 6) couldn't hold a meeting.
Their customer service suggested I disabled the graphics card and to throttle the CPU, converting a $2000 laptop into a $1000 one spec-wise.
After a year and a half, I've just moved to a Thinkpad at half the cost and I couldn't be happier.
I wanted to support a smaller company rather than Lenovo but that's how it is, there where many other nuances I had to deal with (2 dead pixels, awful sound, microphone was meh, TuxedoOS started giving me kernel problems every update...).
At least now I know where to look for the next one, especially in Germany where it's annoyingly difficult to get a US QWERTY kb.
Spec wise this one is quite close to lenovo t14s/p14s gen 4, which can also be configured with a similar screen (there is also the yoga slim 7 gen 8, but it has a glossy screen).
As far as I can tell the trend was first started by the Mechrevo code 01. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-4000-mechrevo-la... Which actually got a decent amount of press have some initial Twitter hype. Several other Clevo based brands followed like Tuxedo and XMG. Not sure that Clevo actually intended it as a dev focused config originally, but they definitely leaned into it with later revisions after they saw the enthusiasm.
Not for everyone, personally the Framework 16 appeals a lot more to me (I've preorded), but when I was in college the pure CPU maximization probably would have won me over.
Historically, a lot of devs using Linux laptops have preferred iGPU models both to maximize useful perf/watt (dGPUs models tended to drain power much faster even when idle) and b/c most dGPU laptops are Nvidia-based and the driver issues used to be terrible. I wonder if that calculus will be changing now w/ local LLM code-helpers and other AI apps benefit greatly from stronger GPUs.
JavaScript would be a strange choice for "fake code for marketing website" even if it was correct code...
Oh, wait, even better, every time the page loads in the code graphic swaps from one arcane language to another.
And to boot: no USB4, & unergonomic ISO key layout instead of an ANSI option
I can only recommend this laptop.
I don’t know if they make them anymore but I highly recommend it.
Laptops with Nvidia dGPUs are available from many/most other manufacturers, as you said, so there is no real reason to buy them from them. Especially if they offer sub-par Linux experience.
Not that this is relevant for this laptop.
From experience, open-source drivers that are integrated into the kernel and open-source source user space have much better quality, better out-of-box experience, and push the whole ecosystem forward.
Compared to closed-source drivers, which often need to catch up to modern software, and are difficult to debug, they need additional steps to integrate and often have to build their own stuff instead of improving existing solutions that help everyone.
You will not get helpful support for errors in your proprietary driver from the manifacturer in most cases, while you get support and fixes from the open source community. It is much easier to isolate the issues if you can access the code.
I’m glad these options exist such as Tuxedo.
And for many HN users, they do get paid to use Mac OS and offered a Macbook for work. I personally still use Linux for work but I have to admit it hinders my work in certain ways (e.g. no easy access to testing Safari and no way to test VoiceOver). But I couldn't trade my setup for whatever Apple decides is best for me. So I appreciate companies still pushing for more solid Linux-first laptops.
The M2 MacBook Pros are about as close as you can get to a perfect laptop. Really, I wish it wasn't so. It would arguably be better for everyone (except Apple) if there was some serious competition at the top end of the market. But there just isn't.
I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management. (A lot of this is an OS integration problem, so Apple is playing on easy mode here.)
I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad. (Again, OS integration, plus a stupid amount of heuristics built into the hardware itself to interpret what you actually meant when you touched the trackpad in an awkward way.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks. (The first generation of M1 MacBook laptops was awful, but they fixed it. Also this point isn't really fair because I haven't really seriously looked.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.
I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time, and not simultaneously sounds like a jet engine and throttle itself to a near halt.
But really, just give me proper power management and a decent trackpad and I'll call it a serious competitor.
It's like a mattress: you spend enough time on it that it's worth paying the money and moving on.
> Just like the CPU, the LPDDR RAM is also soldered onto the motherboard [...]
> Another advantage of LPDDR RAM is its space-saving design, which creates room in the ultra compact chassis not only for the performant and quiet cooling system but also for 2x upgradeable M.2 SSDs [...]
Also, doesn't DDR5 have built-in ECC?
Also, the website talks about M.2 for the SSD form factor. M.2 describes a physical connector standard. I would imagine that's enough to imply that it's not soldered SSDs.
FFIW, you could probably install Arch (from a TTY, like in the old days :p) with the an Ubuntu kernel and any firmware that was loaded-in at runtime from the stock installation-- I'm not convinced it would be neccessary, but Linux is Linux and (most) differences between (most) distributions are minor enough that someone who knows how to troubleshoot this sort of thing could factor them out.
