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KDE Slimbook

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197 pointsbananaoomarang146 comments

Here's another source. https://liliputing.com/2017/01/kde-slimbook-linux-powered-la... the i7 upgrade with 16mb looks good, though I'd prefer better screen resolution.

Not sure if that's a typo in the post but 6,800 mAH for a laptop is tiny.

EDIT: Nevermind, I was thinking of WHr. If it is using a 12V adapter, that is plenty.

That's about what it is in my mid 2014 13" rMBP and I regularly get 8 hours coding on it.

The appropriate measure of capacity would be watt-hours, not milliamp hours.

IIRC the MacBook Pro has a 3 cell battery, meaning that you'll get around ~76Wh from the battery (11.2V * 6800mAh).

It's not safe to assume that all laptops will have a 3 cell battery. They might have chosen to install a 2 cell battery, in which case the capacity would only be ~50Wh (7.4V * 6800mAh). That's 35% less capacity!

True. But is anyone shipping laptop with a Voltage that low? I see them up around 10.8 - 11.1.

I don't know about laptops, but I would expect a lot of these "2 in 1" devices to ship with a 1 or 2 cell battery.

Tablets frequently have lower voltage batteries. The iPad 4 for example has 3 cells but they're all in parallel, so the voltage is only 4.2V.

For laptops the sweet spot seems to be 3 cells, and I'm not entirely sure why, apart from higher voltages requiring smaller traces/wires. Maybe due to the LCD backlight? The LCD from the iPad 4 actually requires ~12V for the backlight, so there's a buck boost converter somewhere on the iPad logic board for this.

Ah shit I was thinking of WHr which is different.

To be honest with Linux I'd still go with 1920x1080, since that's still usable as a native resolution if the UI scaling for HD screens isn't being applied for one reason or the other.

Really? Linux was ready for high DPI screens well before windows. I didn't compare to MacOS back in the early '00s, but (at least for what I use), it may have also beaten MacOS to the punch.

Concretely, I used an old > 1600x1200 21" CRT with Linux starting during the dot com crash, and was bummed when it died and I had to switch to low DPI flat panels.

It doesn't do it well. It's inconsistently applied, many icons/apps incorrectly render, and you have to be consistent in your DE. Much like windows, even windows 10. Somehow, Apple is the only one to have actually solved this well where it just works, and apps that don't support it scale appropriately.

I run Antergos on a Macbook Pro with a HiDPI screen - with a custom compiled kernel. Things work really, really well... until I plug it into a monitor. Linux can't really deal with one screen being high resolution and another screen being 'low' resolution. Icons distort into different sizes and what not. Chrome's window decorations blow up to humongous sizes, etc. Unplugging it and having the screen readjust leaves things pretty broken. It is easier to run the Macbook screen at 1920x1080 just to not have to deal with scaling issues.

Per monitor scaling is supported by, at least, GNOME when you use Wayland.

Linux is the type of situation where apps need to opt into screen scaling. So if you have high dpi and your app isn't aware of pixel density, you'll have to squint to see anything.

I am running linux on a 1440p laptop, and I will say the scaling is less than ideal. Works well for just the 1 screen. But unfortunately carries over to my external monitors (1080p) as well. I wind up downscaling to 1080p when I'm docked.

Does Windows handle multiple monitors with different resolutions well? I haven't really tried it before.

It does, if you say "expand desktop" instead of "duplicate". Obviously. Depending on how you lay the screens out there can obviously be regions that are off-screen, that would confuse an app or two (e.g. imagine a 9-digit phone keypad, one display occupying regions 1 and 2, another regions 5 and 6. An app might think to start with its top edge at the off-screen region 4, and its bottom half in region 1, requiring one to hit Alt-Space, M, to lock the window titlebar to the mouse.

FWIW, I've had a hell of a time dealing with a Surface Pro 4 and multiple monitors. The problem is scaling. The SP4 has a 3200x1800 resolution internal screen, and is quite hard to read with that resolution on a 13" screen. So, Microsoft suggests you turn up the resolution scaling in your display options and scale to 200 or 300%. Now the main SP4 screen looks okay, but if you try plugging it into external 20" or larger monitors, those are going to look atrocious.

So then you might decide to use just the external monitors, and scale it back to 100%. That works pretty well, but Windows forces you to restart (or "Sign Out" and back in, which will close all of your programs and stuff you were working on) every time you change that scaling option. Great! Everything looks fine...until you disconnect the Surface from its dock. Now it's back to looking tiny, and to make use of the SP4 internal screen I've got to once again change the scaling, restart, etc.

People at work ask me why I'm always swearing whenever I come into board meetings. It's because I've just detached my SP4 to bring it into the meeting, and I've either got to drop everything I'm doing to restart and be able to use it during the meeting, or keep the 100% scaling to avoid restarting and squint at my SP4's screen during the meeting.

That problem doesnt exist for me using Win8.1 on laptop and different screens at home and work. Make sure to always use the Win+P "Extend" option, and when first used, select to set the external as primary. Then should work ok. i lost hours to figure this out....same situation as you with need to take my gear to meetings.

Wayland fixes this. Try it with Fedora 25 - most Gnome apps scale seamlessly.

In the meantime, I've found downscaling to be an excellent option.

I've been looking for a good reason to try fedora--this may be it!

Unfortunately, wayland doesn't work with my displaylink dock drivers, but you can't have something for nothing I suppose.

Linux isn't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop. My DE, Cinnamon, eventually looked okay once I tweaked the scaling (worked about as well as GNOME), but I still have to deal with a plethora of apps that are microscopic.

I don't use KDE, but I've been told Qt apps are supposed to scale better on HiDPI.

Linux isn't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop. My DE, Cinnamon,
...

I don't use KDE, ...

Or should we say that Cinnamon on Fedora doesn't work for you, on your hardware instead of dismissing something that many of us prefer to any other operating system, paid or free?

Edit: I'm a bit fed up with people writing like they can decide what is good or not.

I have used Windows since 1995, Linux since at least 2003, Mac (full time for both work and personal) for almost 3 years around 2010. FTR I was enthusiastic about getting a Mac, paid more for software than I'd ever done before, got my employer to pay for extra screen, keyboard, mouse and I think even an extra trackpad. For me it was a huge disappointment and I suffered through the last year after finally admitting it didn't work for me.

I have my opinions. I don't say you cannot prefer something else, but I will not accept other peoples authority to decide which OS is best for me and everyone else.

Edit2: as usual I don't mind the downvotes but I ask you to please tell me what I did to deserve them.

Your defensiveness about your preferred OS blinds you to the point I'm trying to make. There's a reason that there's an entire page on the ArchWiki dedicated to tweaking for HiDPI: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

The fact is, it's not uniformly supported yet across Linux distros. Qt apps should theoretically be DPI-aware, but that's no guarantee either. See the various bugs filed against VLC, for instance: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17823

If your goal is to prove that it can be done, then I'm sure you'd be perfectly happy with KDE or KaOS in order to prevent someone from downloading an app that might not be HiDPI compliant.

But for the average person, it might be more trouble than it's worth. Or they might not like KDE. In which case, my recommendation that it might be better to stick with 1080P for now still stands.

The problem IMO is you just say Linux isn't there yet.

You state it like a fact. You say it with no reservation about this being a very high resolution display etc.

In my opinion it wouldn't be less serious if I said Mac and Windows aren't really there yet because their package managers really doesn't compare to apt. Note: I don't say this. (At least not anymore : )

The quality of a package manager is of much less importance to a desktop system user than the (un)readability display, I would think.

That is a very dangerous statement tbh. In general it is much more important for any system to have its foundations robust.

A package management system is a convenience, not a requirement for desktop users. Chromebooks have one of the most robust and well built foundations I've ever seen, and the platform lacks any semblance of low level package management.

For HiDPI screens? Linux really truly isn't there yet. I say this as someone who has used almost entirely linux desktops and laptops for years, and not exclusively for a long time before that, and who finds nearly everything about a linux desktop better than the alternatives (yes, really).

But my HiDPI laptop brings me frequent pain that I wasn't anticipating and it's not clear there's even a path forward to solving those problems in a consistent way. It's a whack-a-mole problem.

I got it working really well for me.

Please share your list of annoyances, I want to help :)

Off the top of my head ...

Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale. Arduino IDE is a good example - lots of bugs filed about it, some fixes ostensibly out there, but I've spent hours with no success -- the UI is unreadably tiny on my 3yo 3200x1800 laptop.

You can tweak your desktop (I use KDE) and many (but not all) other applications to scale up, but as soon as you plug in a monitor with different characteristics (I frequently plug into a 22" 1600x1200 LCD) things are going to look horrendous on at least one of your screens.

If you fix those two, I'll come up with some more. :)

> Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale.

Isn't that true on every platform?

Well, except Mac OS. There are ways to "forget" about scaling and render in pixel terms, but chances are your app already looks like shit if this applies to you. The native UI toolkit renders to points which are scaled pixels.

Then there's image/graphic density; I can live with that.

The only thing that can be a problem on OS X, and I do mean ONLY thing that I've run into, is some games don't scale at all. So you'll open a game that draws into its window (I recently experienced this with Shenzhen I/O) and everything in the window is rendered like you had one to one pixel scaling. It works perfectly, everything is really tiny.

If you put it in full screen the monitor gets adjusted and it's not an issue.

At the same time other games don't have the problem. For example I've been playing Stardew Valley and it works perfectly fine in windowed mode looking exactly the way you'd want it to.

But normal applications based on UIKit and not a GL surface or something else like that? It's perfect.

> Isn't that true on every platform?

I'm assuming so.

I've been using KDE as primary environment on laptop & desktop since the late 1990's. At dayjob I have to suck it up and use Win7 - typically as a VM (local or remote) running over RDP or VNC - but occasionally native boot. It really breaks badly with high DPI, but it's quite an old OS. I rarely touch MS Windows 8(.1) but when I did, on this hardware, it was struggling to maintain sanity with scaling. I've avoided playing with MS Windows 10, and OSX -- of course, OSX tends to run on its own hardware, so has a bit of an advantage there. I do have a MBP somewhere, and could try cranking it up on the high-DPI 32" monitor ... but a) I'm happy to defer to the expertise of people who have done this and are more familiar with the platform, and b) it won't help me (as I'm not going to move platforms).

First one - IntelliJ (which Android IDE is based off) supports scaling nowadays.

Try running

  xrandr --dpi 200

(try it with lower values like 144 if that's too large)

and restart Android IDE.

Second monitor: you need to render the second screen at High DPI and then downscale. Example script (with two monitors):

  xrandr --output eDP-1 --off
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --right-of DP-2-2
  xrandr --output DP-2-2 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 0x0
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 2880x0

Hi, and thanks for the hints. These were discussed over at arduino.cc a while back, and I had some small measure of success with them, but it was very messy to get this working with the apps that needed them (only). And, ultimately, it broke savagely with problem #2 -- when I move between displays with drastically different DPI's. I don't think that second problem is totally intractable ... but I do think it's a long way of being fixed (on any platform).

EDIT: Oh, and yes, the 'scaling support' feature was added into the version that I was trialling of arduino IDE a while back (I forget the #'s). It was meant to have been resolved, but I noted on the various forums that lots of people (including myself) couldn't get it to play nice. Investigations were on-going whether it was a KDE, xorg/wayland, nvidia, phase of the moon, or some other related problem.

Did you try it? What issues are remaining? Links to the bug tracker reports? Legitimately curious.

Apologies: I reread your posts again and now I see that I interpreted your post out of context, you were specifically talking about high resolutions.

Very few people are going to be using KDE apps exclusively. For a start, it doesn't have a modern web browser, and a huge amount of stuff relies on one these days.

KDE Neon that I use currently comes with Firefox as tha default browser out of the box.

For me at least that is the only modern browser I want.

One assumes the GUI configuration would be great on something coming from the GUI developers - regardless of DPI.

> Linux isn't really there yet.

It really isn't, quite. I'm using a brand new Dell XPS 13 with the way-too-many-pixels option, and there are a lot of things that have to be tweaked, particularly if you're not running a mainstream desktop environment. Even with tweaks in place, there're places where proportions are off and/or UI elements are way too tiny.

I expect that things will improve within the working lifetime of this laptop, but it's definitely a problem at the moment.

I'd happily donate money to some kind of Linux Dealing With Too Many Pixels Initiative, if someone were going to put together an effort at putting developer time into all the miscellaneous issues and getting fixes into distros / applications / desktops / etc.

Have you had any problems with your new XPS' keyboard? Mine lags and sometimes doesn't register keypresses on around the D key.

Just a guess from someone who doesn't have an XPS but has experienced similar symptoms. Maybe there's some kind of debris or perhaps liquid in between the switch contacts for those keys. In my case, two plastic sheets comprised the contact surfaces and getting them separated and cleaning them with a damp cloth and drying them did the trick.

I have an XPS13 1080p 9350. The keyboard actually works fine but it is the only weakness of the laptop in my opinion. I don't have any keys that cause problems but the quality of the arrow keys on that laptop is really bad - one reason why I switched to vim keybindings by taking advantage of the TAB key. In terms of keytravel Lenovo laptops and Macbooks <2016 are much better.

> In terms of keytravel Lenovo laptops and Macbooks <2016 are much better.

This is such a sad statement about the quality of today's laptop keyboards. Of the laptops I can remember using the keyboard on the Thinkpad 701C "butterfly" was superior to that on the T20 and T42 in terms of key shape and stroke, and the T42 is superior to the X60. The keyboards on the (work-issued) Macbook Air 2012 and Macbook Pro 2013 are garbage by comparison.

In my more conspiracy-minded moments, I conclude that the overall trend towards garbage keyboards even on high-end machines is long-game industry collusion to force us all, eventually, into pure-touchscreen interfaces.

I glimpse the future every time I use my smartphone, and it is stupid.

Not to speak of, but I have friends with earlier models who I think did experience some weirdness. ISTR something about a BIOS update fixing it?

I'm optimistic that it will get better as more developers buy newer laptops with QHD+ resolutions. ElementaryOS even had a pledge fund to get the founder a 3200x1800 res laptop just so he could actually dogfood his OS on a hi-res laptop and improve HiDPI support. Unless, of course, the average Linux developer remains a graybeard with a Thinkpad. Then we might be waiting for awhile. :)

The other major hump to get over at the moment is that many of the distros are spending resources to switch to Wayland, and I imagine we'll need to let that transition stabilize first before we get the bulk of resources diverted to HiDPI support.

The Wayland transition will, itself, probably leave people with my preferences (tiling WM, a stack of other small customizations that depend on X) high and dry for a while, but I guess one can hope that it'll be a solid foundation for future development.

I'm just not transitioning until my preferred WM (stumpwm or another Common Lisp tiling WM) transitions. I'm a bit skeptical that Wayland provides any significant benefits for my use cases.

> Unless, of course, the average Linux developer remains a graybeard with a Thinkpad.

The latest generation Thinkpads have high res screens :)

> many of the distros are spending resources to switch to Wayland

High DPI support is vastly improved in Wayland, so that's a good thing!

> particularly if you're not running a mainstream desktop environment

This is a bit unfair. "Linux isn't there yet, if you use an unpopular DE".

I have an xps13 with the default windowing manager that Dell installed and it is really inconsistent in sizing (some things are weirdly large while others hard to read from being too small)

> Linux isn't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop.

That's odd. I've got an Asus ZenBook (UX305FA) running Fedora 25 with Gnome. I'm using my BenQ BL2710PT at its regular 2560 x 1440 resolution and it looks great. Other than adjusting the brightness a little I didn't have to do any tweaks.

Same for me. Works extremely well nowadays.

Only application that doesn't scale is yEd, but it's 3rd party closed sourve and it doesn't scale on OS X or Windows either.

27" at 2560x1440 is not high DPI and doesn't require UI upscaling. On e.g. a MacBook Retina you would not be able to read anything without upscaling because the pixel density is so high. It's the main reason I still use OS X on my MBP.

Thanks for the clarification.

For reference, a Retina 5K iMac is 27" and its native resolution is 5120x2880, exactly 4x as many pixels.

> Linux isn't really there yet.

To be fair, neither is Windows. I've had nothing but trouble with scaling my 4k laptop display under Windows 10. Some apps pick up the scaling info and work correctly, others don't. Some apps scale their fonts correctly, but leave their (presumably pixel map) UI elements microscopic. Things get even screwier when I use it in extended desktop mode with my (larger) 1080p monitor. If the scaling is on, the monitor is unusable. If the scaling is off, the display is unusable.

Seems like the only company that got this transition right so far is Apple.

Exactly the opposite experience for me.

Fedora 25, 200dpi screen, no issues whatsoever (works and looks way better than Windows!).

What issues are you having? Maybe they're easily solved.

"Linux" meaning all desktop environments -- including Cinnamon, which is very nice in some ways, but developed by a small team and therefore sort of inherently "caveat emptor" -- will never be "really there yet" because backwards compatibility means that someone will always be able to write an app that screws up. But IMO if the laptop is sold by KDE, it's reasonable for them to sell a HiDPI screen assuming that you can use the computer fully with KDE specifically, because why should KDE have to hold their hardware back to wait for the five-person team behind the Lorem Ipsum toolkit? Of course the definition of "fully" may be subject to review, and one of the problems is that Linux reviewers are too nice: if KDE's VLC replacement works on HiDPI but won't play common formats, the laptop should lose big points for video playback; unfortunately, reviewers let this kind of thing slide too much, and the community suffers for it.

This is great. The only trouble is that it's only got two USB ports and no Ethernet. Secondarily, the USB ports are only 3.0 not 3.1.

Other than that, having a stable KDE Neon hardware platform is really exciting to me. I run KDE Neon full-time on my Macbook Pro.

Any other KDE Neon fans out there?

Yups. Neon is pretty solid at the moment, and just getting started. I run it on an XPS13 and have had no issues yet (but did not try working with an external monitor yet, which is known as sometimes giving issues)

I really like KDE and installed Neon a few weeks ago. However, I encountered bunch of issues, sudden chain-crashes of software, some settings not being saved, plasmoids and wallpapers not being downloaded and most notably the digital clock displaying incorrect time (tried everything to no avail). For some reason it didn't work properly on my laptop. I ended up installing Kubuntu.

There are always some personal preferences, such as that I would wish the i7 was quad-core. But I'm a big fan of KDE Neon, and would very likely get this one if I was in the market for a new laptop at the moment.

Why does the KDE Slimbook have a Windows key? http://kde.slimbook.es/images/xheader.png.pagespeed.ic.WfFJL...

Could they not get a Tux or even the KDE Gear icon printed on the keyboard?

Because they sell Slimbooks with either Linux or Windows: https://slimbook.es/caracteristicas

Why not make it something brand less? They allow customizations by language; it's not crazy to put thought into the keyboard at that point.

"Meta" would be a good name.

"Meta" usually refers to Alt on Linux systems with IBM-PC-derived keyboards. When I look at `xmodmap -pm` on my system, the Windows key is referred to as "Super".

That's a rather arbitrary binding; some keyboards have a discrete meta key. No reason to use super if you're not targeting windows!

Alt had already been used to replace meta by the time the windows key came about. Therefore they mapped the windows key to super.

You can blame Emacs users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)

KDE announcement: https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-lapt...

Slimbook site seems to have collapsed under the internet's hug.

The announcement gives a more understandable purpose to the laptop, namely: get the KDE developers and enthusiasts onto a uniform piece of hardware.

It's much easier to do Apple-levels of QA when you have Apple-level hardware control.

https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-kde/kde-intel-i7-compr...

Feel like for the price, you could get a comparable laptop that's a hair lighter and just throw KDE onto it. The only thing I see on there that makes it inherently more FOSS-friendly is the inclusion of an Intel wifi card, that has a kernel-supported driver in Linux.

I'm also not too keen on the bezel size. I guess I've been spoiled by my XPS 13.

There's Dell, sure, but by the looks I think this is trying to draw the Aluminum Apple crowds closer.

I have an XPS13 with an Intel wifi card; still has the occasional issues (wifi not picking up networks after waking up from suspend). I'd say it happens to me on average once every one or two months, seemingly at random.

For as well-supported Intel wireless NIC's are, I've found they are utter garbage. The Intel 7260 in my work-issued W540 randomly flakes out on me and has giant latency spikes, I actually ended up saying to hell with the one in my personal XPS 13 and swapped it with a Broadcom card that's worked much better.

Good to know. I kind of assumed they'd be like Intel graphics: most open among its competition.

You're not wrong, which is why I said they are well-supported. But that doesn't mean anything when the hardware itself is awful, I have the same issues regardless of whether I'm using Linux or Windows.

I may need a proprietary kernel module for my Broadcom NIC, but the damned thing actually works consistently.

>16GB: +190,00 €

Jesus christ that is absolutely absurd.

I was super excited about this until I saw it was another 13" screen. Does anyone enjoy using a screen that small (honest question)? To me anything under 15" just doesn't make sense, especially if 50% of my time is spent without an external monitor.

I prefer it for mobile, it's a nice balance. Even though I use a 27" monitor at home, I adjust easily enough.

For me anything bigger that 13" is anchored to the desktop and I don't consider it mobile. 11"-13" is mobile for me or 20+" for desktop. In between are useless screen sizes for me because I'm not going to lug around a 15" or 17" laptop and if it's going to be on my desk, I'm going bigger.

I suspect this is a different strokes for different folks thing. 13" is just ideal for me. Also I've adjusted my workflow so that with multiple desktops, having one screen is not that big an issue. 15 means it's heavy enough that I can't just forget that it's even in my bag.

Yes, the small screen is great on flights and other cramped conditions.

When at a desk, I sometimes connect to a large screen, but honestly I often just don't bother.

I've got an 11.6" netbook-class computer to use in really cramped situations, but it always feels cramped to me. 17" feels like an unwieldy beast of a machine, so I've never had one.

15" is what I consider the minimum for anything beyond e-mail and internet, and simultaneously the maximum that I'd actually like to carry around with me. That doesn't seem like the most popular opinion, though. 13" seems like it's considered the portability+productivity sweet spot for most of the people I've talked to.

I don't mind a small screen when I'm using Linux, but that's mostly because I spend most of my time in a full screen terminal with Linux. I don't use KDE, but xmonad and quickly page between mostly fullscreen applications so I don't need as much screen real estate. When I'm using Windows it's a different story, however and I find the a laptop screen really cramped a lot of the time. That's because I'm inevitably using a lot of GUI applications on Windows and they tend not to be as efficient with screen real estate. I haven't used KDE in a long while, but I know that it places a lot of emphasis on visuals and I suspect that it might be in the same place as Windows.

I bought a 13" because of it's mobility advantages. I don't have any issues with the size but if I needed to work on it as my main machine most of the time, I would buy a 15".

13" is just fine for me, personally. I value portability. In fact, the newer line of laptops following in the vein of the bezel-less XPS13's that can fit 13" of screen into an 11" chassis is even better.

>I was super excited about this until I saw it was another 13" screen.

Same. Anything less than 15" is completely unusable to me.

15" is way too big to actually be portable. My work machine is 15" and I find it almost unusable away from my desk. 13" is just perfect.

Of course, at my desk, I have an external monitor...

Personally I don't see how people could even stand using a laptop smaller than 15", but maybe that's just because every laptop I've ever owned has been 15".

...that said, I do own a 10" tabtop, and that's... good for web browsing I guess, wouldn't dream of coding on it.

After owning and using a loadvof machines over the years i find 10-11" is great for travelling and office work but need at least 13" to be able to code. Note sure why but this has held true across all the OS so its not a software thing. I thinks is visual and ergonomics. End result is Mac Air for me home projects coding while sitting on the lounge floor, 10" Pioneer W10 tablet with BT keyboard on Win10 for travel ans work Lenovo T440p with a 22" external at home and 28" external at work. To put in context, i build stuff, code, design and read, use a lot of VMs. I dont do gaming or watch movies/tv on computers.

I find every extra inch past "13 feels clunkier and clunkier to me.

Being able to carry around a smaller bag is nice too.

Website isn't loading for me but seems to be cached.

Text only: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kde.sli...

Full cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Akde.s...

There seems to be no mention of firmware on the site. Can someone in the know comment on if coreboot is supported?

Not again. I do wish the KDE project would stop getting distracted by quixotic hardware and/or mobile projects and concentrate on building a killer desktop. I hate to say it but parts of KDE today do feel worse than what we had ten years ago e.g. kmail2/akonadi which causes me pain on a daily basis.

Also this thing feels like a cheap knockoff. Whats with the shitty website (looks like a mobile only site on my desktop) and the low quality graphics/photos? Also isnt this supposed to be a Linux machine? Why does it have a Windows key then? http://kde.slimbook.es/images/galeria/resizedimages/4_machin... Sorry, but the whole thing feels fake.

I don't mean to diss the KDE project, but my experience with KDE, ever since around 2., has been that it feels optimized for screenshots: Everything looks gorgeous* out of the box, but when you start actually using the destkop, a lot of things feel clunky, cluttered, buggy or they just don't make sense in the current world (Plasma, I'm looking at you.) I also can't understate the "buggy" part. I've never experienced as many crashes as when using applications in the KDE suite of utilities.

It seems like KDE has always been too broadly focused instead of just trying to be a kickass desktop. Things like KOffice just seem to be unneccesary replication of effort to get prettier qt widgets.

10 years ago I KDE groupie, but on my latest install of gone with gnome and found the default themes (especially dark mode) to be much better. Also the fonts, I'm a programmer that wouldn't normally notice the difference between a serif and san-serif font, but whatever the gnome guys are doing looks absolutely gorgeous.

There are a number of people who thought that having a KDE office suite was a good idea, they worked on it, KDE gladly welcomed them into the project and provided infrastructure & announcements.

Those same people might have not worked on the bits that you value yourself even if they were forced off of KOffice (now Calligra). They likely contributed a number of bugfixes and expanded use cases for KDE libraries along the way.

KDE still has a well-defined desktop environment project, you just can't force people into it that have a different agenda to begin with.

Back in the day, my preferred setup was Gnome 2 + KDE3 apps. Then, KDE4 happened and ruined most of the KDE apps, while Gnome 3 took care of the desktop environment. Since then, I've transitioned to roll-you-own desktop envs built around the tiling window manager stumpwm

One of my workstations is Kubuntu 14.04. It looks amazing out of the box, but you have to turn the bling off to actually use it (I don't really need a bright blue shadow around the active window, for example). I really like it's old-school configurability, but you're right - it's way too buggy. Lots of little things that add up, and include freezes where I have to kill the plasma-desktop and restart it - how a non-techie is supposed to survive this, I don't know.

I really like the configurability (gnome3 went in the opposite direction and declared that configurability was evil), but I think you nailed it with 'designed for screenshots'...

Sounds like the same brainbug that ate up Mozilla.

Please give me a 32GB Ram option.

If not possible, please tell me why. :(

Can you explain your use-case?

PS: 8GB user

I have 16 Gb in the MBP I use for photo editing, and more memory would be really nice. I'll sometimes have Capture One, DxO Optics, and PixelMator open at the same time, and I notice a performance impact versus only having one of them open. They don't die outright, but performance suffers when there's not enough memory to hold many preview and thumbnail images in memory.

I have Linux running on an old iMac, also with 16 Gb, and I've hit the boundary there a few times, too, but usually only when I'm playing with 3D graphic rendering.

More memory never hurts, and often speeds things up.

There's also the psychological aspect that if I'm buying a new machine I want it to be bigger and better than the ones I already have.

Because of the energy needs, and the limits of intel processors with specific DRAM types. There was a good ars technica article on this posted to HN a month or two ago (about the new MBP).

Here's a good technical description:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/59yrxg/the_true_reas...

Maybe those system 72 laptops, I remember there was an animation talk about Finding Dory and the guy was using one but it's Ubuntu-oriented I think. 32GB sounds nuts haha.

While this sounds interesting, unless there is:

- a user friendly support/bug reporting channel

- some sort of promise that actual found bugs will be resolved with a higher priority

- sane configurations + nice themes out of the box

Unless all of those are offered, I don't see any draw to buying this. The way I see it, this is something only early adopters would get. There's no guarantee that things will work smoothly out of the box. If I'm going to be paying for a KDE branded device, then I'd need to be convinced that the experience would be better than buying a nice, "Linux compatible" (per reviews, whatever) notebook and just installing Neon on it myself. This is what Apple and Microsoft (with their Surface line) do and while neither are perfect, everyone I know feels safer buying those brands. And in the end, that's the biggest driving force in decision making for normal consumers.

Very nice. I would buy this over a MacBook Air assuming two things:

* The trackpad isn't terrible

* The battery life is decent (6+ hours)

This looks remarkably similar to the HP Envy that I bought in 2015: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015AD1ZFA/ The HP has a slightly different port arrangement on the sides and a higher resolution screen.

I'm sure the cost supports the KDE project, but you could buy the HP, install Linux yourself (if you're buying one of these you are probably capable of installing your own OS), and donate $50 to the KDE project and come out ahead-- assuming you live in the USA and can get the old Envy for $715.

The big benefit of Slimbook would be the tested hardware "where any potential hardware-related issues have already been ironed out before a new version of our software is shipped to them", according to the KDE announcement: https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-lapt...

>CD-ROM/DVD - Not available

>Package Contents - 1 x drivers disk

Why?!

I see an overpriced Chinese ultra-book with a weird laser etched logo. I was mildly interested until seeing the price point. 4GB ram and a dual core i5 for $800 is crazy in 2017.

Not sure who they're expecting to buy this.

I would be a lot more interested in a laptop from Red Hat or Canonical.

Is there anything like this with 3x3 MIMO wifi and a hi-dpi screen? my 13" macbook pro is great but not sure if I could go backwards on those 2 points right now.

My Asus UX303 looks almost identical to this (the only difference I could find is small bevel underneath touchpad). Is UX303 then also a rebrand of some generic model?

My current experience is that it's great linux laptop even though it's not supported (comes with Windows). It's fast and snappy, very light, robust and nice to use. Keyboard is bad, touchpad is meh. Screen is very sharp and comfortable. Speakers are surprisingly useful.

KDE is great, though it feels like things take a long time to implement (such as move to Wayland).

KDE has the extra layer of Qt in between. That brings a load of benefits thanks to an array of paid professional hands developing the toolkit, but the downside of course is that some of the issues just have to be fixed on the Qt level.

For example, it took a while before the multi-screen support in Qt 5 was mature enough to provide a stable foundation for a desktop environment. I'm sure KDE could solve these problems somehow in-house too, but the fact is that development power is limited so it makes all the sense to solve the issues in the correct layer in the first place.

Yeah, multiscreen was a complete mess until very recently. Not just because of Qt, but because of several Plasma bugs. It's much better now.

Just curious if anyone considering this has compared it to the Chromebook Pixel 2015 model. The Pixel is discontinued now but still available (and for half of its retail price). It seems like the two machines target a similar audience.

No go. Shitty keyboard. Learn from Thinkpad T400 how good keyboard looks like.

Are there Linux users out there that would actually use a pre-installed OS?

If someone sold hardware that came with some guarantee that a major linux distro had 100% support of all the hardware I would definitely consider buying it. I use ThinkPads because their support is pretty good (and I like the physical device) but there is always some trade off when it comes to hardware and the drivers.

Probably not (many), but I'd wager a thing like this is largely aimed at current non-Linux users anyway.

Alternately, Linux by default could be seen as a sign that hardware is reasonably well supported, so rolling one's own may be less effort than otherwise.

The KDE announcement does promise that hardware issues for this device are sorted out before pushing out updates.

The picture provided isn't big enough to be 100% sure but as far as I can tell the super key features the windows logo...

According to OMG Ubuntu http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/slimbo...

Why is the opening hero image so small? Aren't they trying to showcase the product?

This looks great; may well be my next laptop.

I had now clue "KDE Neon" was an operating system.

It's made by the same people that ran Kubuntu before they got disappointed in some of Canonical's decisions and decision-making process, so now they have their own OS that works closer with KDE upstream.

slimbook.es is down, anyone has the pricing info?

729€ for i5 and 849€ for i7.

... and specs? ram, screen res, battery claims ... I'm potentially interested!

Found the specs on the OMGubuntu website (1):

KDE Slimbook i5

Intel i5-6200U @ 2.3GHz Intel Graphics HD 520 4GB, 8GB or 16GB RAM 120GB SSD (upgradeable) Priced from €729 Full HD 13"

KDE Slimbook i7

Intel i7-6500U @ 2.5GHz Intel Graphics HD 520 4GB, 8GB or 16GB RAM 120GB SSD (upgradeable) Priced from €849 Full HD 13"

1: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/01/kde-slimbook-laptop-specs...

Here's a slightly fuller overview than the commenter above:

Slimbook KDE i7: Base=879 euro

Slimbook KDE i5: Base=729 euro

Memory: 4gb=base; 8gb=+60; 16gb=+190

SSD: 120gb=base; 250gb=+110; 500gb=+200

WiFi: Intel 7265N=base; Intel 7265AC=+29

Cache:

https://archive.is/ve28m

Looks identical to a macbook air, down to the screws.

I wonder why they used a Spanish TLD.

Because it's a Spanish company.

> 729,00 € = $1021 CAD!

There's just no way this is going to compete with Chromebook which you can install Ubuntu as well or buying any slightly older laptops and installing ubuntu.

what is the minimum cost of such "slim" devices? I'm optimistic that Chromebook will come down in prices and armed with built in cellular connectivity with ARM processor for that all day battery life is the ultimate dev tool.

I enjoy using last year's macbook but I equally enjoyed using Ubuntu on my older laptop for development purposes.

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