Hacker News Reader

Comment by AmosLightnin | Hacker News Reader

I purchased a Tuxedo laptop last summmer in order to support Linux only hardware vendors, but sadly it's been one of the worst computers - with the worst customer service - I've ever used. Sending it back for repairs doesn't help - they ignore the issues and fail to resolve them. At one point I didn't get a response for weeks. I'm not sure how their trustpilot score recently improved from fair / bad to great, but I'm suspicious that they could make such a turnaround so quickly. Read the bad reviews and they're quite consistent. https://au.trustpilot.com/review/tuxedocomputers.com

View on HN

I second this. Bought a notebook from them in 2016 and it was one of the worst purchases. The fan last around 8-12 months before it craps out. (went through 3 so far) The power supply is fragile, and I had to solder it several times already. The support ... well I asked them about when they would ship a bios update for some common vulns - first I got denials that these (Intel ME) vulns "aren't an issue" because you need physical access to the machine. Once the news about the vulns hit mainstream media they promised to email me with updates about their latest updates. After most my colleagues machines from other vendors had been patched after few months but they still had not shipped any fix. After 1 year of back and forth and empty promises about "stay tuned" or "please check our website for updates" I eventually told them to get f'ed.

It seems the people who work there also have little love for the community they serve. They use the FOSS/Freedom type of branding to sell into a niche of gullible enthusiasts (like myself) who believe that supporting such companies makes a difference. The prices don't justify the product. You're better off building your own system from scratch or buying a more commonly available brand for 30% less of the price. It's not like they invest some of the money back into developing replacements for proprietary binary blobs or open hardware or any of these things. You want to stay away from this company and the rubbish they're peddling!

Hmm, these are disappointing reviews ... specs and price look quite good.

I really want a company like this to succeed with Linux first laptops! Maybe System76 is closer to making it happen? I have really enjoyed pop!_os, so I’m considering one of their machines for my next laptop.

I have a System76 laptop, a Gazelle 17-inch. See [0] for exact specs.

pop_os! has been fantastic, though it has some ways to go, particularly in the power management department. Overall, the biggest drawback is definitely the battery life. If you look around for System76 laptop reviews you'll see that battery life is a consistent issue. I'm able to get ~1.5-2 hours on integrated graphics, about 45 minutes using Nvidia graphics.

At first I thought it was just the battery/device itself, (the device is largely is a rebranded Clevo laptop with System76's firmware and other custom parts), so I installed Windows on the machine to see what kind of battery life I'd get under that. Windows was able to get ~6 hours with the same workflow (mostly browsing, streaming, email) and ~4 hours with the Nvidia graphics.

[0]: https://system76.com/guides/gaze14/17b

That is pretty drastic. What's the culprit for such a massive difference?

Linux power management has always been terrible. It's a server OS, all the big players develop for server first, and PM on laptops is an obscure and unsexy corner of the ecosystem.

TBH it's not even a Linux issue as much as a FOSS issue, pretty much any alternative ecosystem has the same problems.

On Lenovo thinkpads like the x1 carbon I am able to get to get 4 to 5 hours of battery life on a charge. Not bad at all.

Linux power management for laptops is mostly a hardware and OEM problem. Every system has at least a few components that don't follow spec for power management, and the OEMs ship their workarounds in Windows drivers rather than in the system firmware. And none of those issues are publicly documented, so Linux developers have to reverse-engineer what PM features are actually usable under Windows on a certain system rather than trust what the hardware and firmware declare support for.

I do not disagree, but that’s where the FOSS structural incentives tend to fail. WiFi chipsets have the same “institutional problems”, but everyone needs WiFi so enough hackers will pour over the problem and generally find decent solutions. That’s generally not the case for power management, because most people will be ok with keeping “the brick” connected most of the time. Every once in a while, this or that company will throw a bit of money at the problem and solve it for a few models, for a few months... and then we go back to square 1.

I don't think the lack of appropriate structural incentives has anything to do with FOSS. It's that Microsoft has a near-monopoly on operating systems, so it's easier for PC hardware vendors to work directly with just Microsoft to deal with problems, rather than publicly document their hardware errata for the benefit of multiple OS vendors.

This is no different for any other chipset under the sun, from the good ol' "winmodems" of the '90s to today. But some stuff gets fixed and some doesn't. Power management is one of those that "doesn't".

I’ve had the same experience. Ubuntu 18.04 and up on a Dell Inspiron. 2hrs Max. Always warm, fans on all the time.

Installed TLP and now I get 5hrs or more depending on workload. Usually more.

Seriously, just have a check of what the system is and install TLP if it’s a laptop. It’s 2020.

I guess that is the default experience with no tweaks? Any success with TLP?

Anecdata, but I had a Dell xps 15 with discrete nvidia graphics. Similar numbers to yours. For my next laptop I got a Thinkpad X390 and this little 13" laptop gets about 4-6 hours on linux, without any tweaking.

They claim up to 17.6 hours in tech specs. Did you check your workflow with Windows? 4-6 hours is nice, but if you could get full work day with Windows, it doesn't look that impressive.

I have a system 76 oryx pro. I love it, though it’s big and heavy, it has 6 cores and a gpu that handles everything I through at it. Battery life is terrible, I could make it better by switching to the internal intel gpu (and sometimes I do) but it requires a reboot. For me it’s a portable workstation. I have an system 76 desktop too. It arrived dead, but support was able to point me to the card that came loose in shipping.

Pleasantly surprised at how low matenance the os is (pop os)

> specs and price look quite good.

Do they? I saw Ryzen 3xxxU which are okay but not outstanding. It's the Ryzen 4xxxU which wipes the floor with everyone else: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html the Ryzen 7 4800U has seventy percent advantage in performance per watt over the best Intel. The top four CPUs in this list are all Ryzen 4xxxU. (Also, if we wanted to list CPUs for similar targets and just list the 15W ones, this list would look super sad for Intel.)

Same here, the fans are awfull and have very limited lifespan.

This has been my experience with a lot of these indie open source hardware projects. They are awesome for tinkering but often suck for regular use. I think the task of building a laptop is just too much for small teams and they can't afford to put the good quality parts in because they aren't ordering 1 million of the part.

For now I'll stick to buying a proprietary dell laptop and putting linux on it myself. My Dell XPS has been getting regular firmware updates over LVFS in the 2 years I have had it.

I am reflecting on this post, and I am thinking of an ancient "Marketing" book I once read (paper back, well-worn) years ago. This book was written well before the internet was a thing, but the tenet was to not allow a customer to walk away like this. Such a lost customer is more costly than literally giving away the product for free: they will - through word of mouth - set in motion a diffusion process in their social network. The authors estimated this would cost 7 (I think?) customers.

Now, here we are in the top post of hackernews, probably the main target group of this company. Of the millions of people reading this, most will now never buy a tuxedocomputers computer. This post (and the one replying to it with a similar sentiment), may have killed the whole thing.

I wonder what the authors of this Marketing book would have thought about that. Heh.

A while back, if even claimed to have a defective Logitech mouse, they'd just send you a new one per mail no questions asked. No need to even send the old one back. Seems like a good move now.

I too had problems with their hardware and awful customer support experience, including a several weeks radio silence (a call to their hotline didn't help; in a second call I asked for the responsible manager, which resulted in me getting a status update a day later -- but still no resolution to my issues).

Avoid them like COVID-19.

I am sad that choice in Linux laptops is greatly diminished compared to six, seven years ago. Hackers, recommend some other vendors in Eurozone because Tuxedo leaves me barely satisfied.

Bought a laptop from them in 2017, it shipped out eight days after ordering.

The good: Great value for the cost, all components properly supported with drivers.

The bad: The product photos on the shop site tell a selective truth. I have some gripes with the hardware design that I only noticed after unpacking and using the device.

1. ⇞⇟⇱⇲ keys are positioned unergonomically. On keyboards in Acer and Sony laptops they are in a much better place.

2. One rubber foot is attached to the rechargeable battery. If you take it out to conserve product life, the device will wobble considerably. The battery is also very difficult to remove. In an Acer or Sony laptop one unlocks a grasp and pulls it off the back-side, this can be done blind and with one hand and with the device oriented for normal operation.

In the Tuxedo, one has to turn over the device because the rechargeable battery lifts out of the bottom. One has to risk breaking off a finger nail each time to get some leverage. At the same time, one hand lifts it out, and the other hand holds open the grasp, otherwise it snaps shut again, and one can't help but apply some pressure into the opposite direction. That's fucking retarded. What was the responsible engineer thinking?

3. The power supply pack is huge and heavy.

4. After powering up, the device always starts out with keyboard backlight switched on. There is no BIOS option to permanently disable it, one always has to wait until the OS is sufficiently loaded to switch it off.

I suggest you to look at a 3-5 year old business models from trusted vendors (whoever you like, Dell, HP, etc) and check out their hardware and whether it's compatible with Linux. They usually have good enough build quality and unless there's some incompatible piece of hardware, things are likely to work.

There are mobile workstation lines with awesome hardware (like Xeon, ECC, Quadro) which support Linux officially. If you have extra money to spend, you might want to check them out as well. Every major brand has those. They usually are bulky and not that mobile, but they are powerful.

You can check out Slimbook (ES based) which has some nice Clevo ultrabook models (Intel-only). For those in the US, IMO System76 seems to be providing the most value add from the Linux system vendors these days.

Someone just told me on Diaspora that their Tuxedo-badged, Clevo-made laptops were horrible, fragile, with poor linux compatibility :)

I was looking to buy a laptop from Tuxedo Computers, but I've read the same customer service experience from other people. Their positive trustpilot reviews are mostly generic short and always 2 days apart, which seems like fake reviews to me.

Damn I had kind of the same, also the worst computer I ever bought after having done research for a long time to get a Linux computer. I send it back two times and they fixed the Bluetooth and audio two times and then it broke again. And the glue under the plastic bezel around the screen started dissolving, I lost most of the screws and then I think it started overheating and switching itself off in both Windows and Linux. I payed about 1000 EUR for it and after 1.5 years later I had to buy something else.

Thanks, I really appreciate the review. It looked good but a little pricey to me, I noticed Acer and others have ryzen 3 and 5 laptops now so I think there are a lot of options.

I'm skeptical that the market for users who want Linux preinstalled is significant... is it easy enough now to use that installing it is hard in comparison? I feel like if you can use it you can probably install it fine if pointed at a distro. Maybe a link to Rufus to write the USB boot disk.

I agree that there is probably a limited market for preinstalled Linux. Perhaps it's an option for folks who want/need Linux and don't want to deal with any of the complications that often exist for desktop use. I figure part of the allure is also that the machine is then inherently optimally compatible with Linux to begin with. I'm not sure how much that matters in practice these days though since there seems to be very few commonly used components that have poor support.

True, I suppose some mismatched or buggy hardware is a bigger issue in laptops. Like it's a pretty big problem if the wifi driver on my laptop is buggy in Linux, though nowadays that likely means it's buggy in Windows anyway.

The last laptop I purchased would literally BSOD only when connected to certain manufacturer (Cisco) access points under unclear conditions. It was a known bug. HP never bothered to release an installable patch and the one provided by Intel made the computer unbootable.

But I suppose there's likely still a market for people buying enough computers at a time that the risk of a hardware issue is not worth the premium.

I'm buying laptops with preinstalled Linux and then I purge it and install Arch Linux on it. But then I'm at least sure that there are drivers for all of the hardware build in there somewhere and I can install them and use everything build in. Also I'm hoping to vote for Linux support with my (or my employers) wallet.

The common reason to buy a computer preinstalled with linux is to not pay the windows/ios tax. Not that the price would be different though.

For me it’s more about making sure the hardware support is good.

The sad fact is that the Microsoft tax is cheaper than the extra costs niche manufacturers need to charge because by nature they have worse economics of scale.

Yeah - there’s that too. I need to run Windows in a VM anyways for some specialized tasks, so having the Windows license is useful.

Is “Tuxedo” a brand applied to whitelabel laptops? If so, they may have no control over hardware issues, and you might be able to get the same laptop at a better price / with better support elsewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com