New KDE Slimbook launched with Ryzan-4000 series processor | Hacker News Reader

New KDE Slimbook launched with Ryzan-4000 series processor

neowin.net

109 pointsjlpcsl63 comments

Probably worth mentioning that they also do a non KDE version of these two laptops without the KDE branding on the lid and with your choice of a number of different Linux distros (or windows) pre-installed.

Here is the 14" model: https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-x-i7-1-compr...

and 15" model: https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x-15/pro-x-i7-2-co...

of note those machines are machines with Intel Processors in the same chassis, and are not AMD powered.

When I click on the link I get the option between AMD and Intel, and the AMD link takes me to this model, which does seem to be the same without branding: https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x-15/pro-x-15-amd-...

Ohh interesting - I was wrong, thanks for correcting me. I didn't see this link on the website.

Yeah sorry - they messed up the links for the AMD and Intel versions of the laptop. The links that I gave originally linked to the AMD versions (even though they have i7 in the URL). The new correct URLs are:

https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-x-amd-compra...

https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x-15/pro-x-15-amd-...

No sorry, my bad too - I missed those options altogether when I was looking at the website.

anything like this for US shoppers?

Wow, this laptop is serious business, it's the only less-than-15-inch laptop I could find with 32GB of RAM below 1500 EUR (it's only 1069!). Does anyone have any experience with these ones, any reviews?

That sounds great and good to see AMD cpu as intel has been very problematic in last few years (especially on linux, but windows as well), 32gigs ram for that money is great when thinkpad t495s comes with 8gig ram soldered on the board.

But where is the trackpoint?

The trackpoint is a patented IBM/Lenovo thing, isn't it...?

For the most part, but for example HP Elitebooks and some Dell models have copies of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick

However, the non-Lenovo/IBM models seem to be somewhat worse (probably for patent reasons).

It’s got to be expired now. It’s been over 20 years.

The thing is, a lion share of all AMD notebooks on the market is developed, and manufactured by a single OEM.

If you look inside recent lenovos, or huawei laptops: scratch, scratch, and you see Qinghua Tongfang logos on PCB, and body parts. The PCB design, and parts list is nearly identical.

Very few big brand companies have in-house engineering for laptops, and the few who have, have it for Intel only.

This is really cool information.

My current laptop is a €3.000 Lenovo X1, which I'm not particularly impressed by.

I was impressed by my 440s which lasted 5 years though.

Where would you suggest I go for my next laptop?

X1 has a 15w ULP CPU. Is it the performance that doesn't satisfy you? If so, the 45W Ryzen should indeed blow it out of water.

I cannot find any new machine on the market with the OLED screen X1 has though.

Sorry, it's an X1 extreme with a i7-9850H, also 45W. Compute capability wise, I'm quite happy.

I've been disappointed with build quality compared to the older 440s. The nvidia prime setup with a shared frame buffer also makes the external display ports more or less useless under linux.

I feel like I've paid a high lenovo premium for a more-or-less average notebook. If all branded laptops are using the same platform, I'm wondering if there's a way to avoid paying that premium.

Well, I myself have not seen any notebook as of late that satisfies my standards on build quality too.

I myself long time dreamed to build my own, fully custom, factory quality notebook, and possibly spin a small business around that.

Dell XPS has set a new high in laptop quality after a decade of boring, rebranded OEM designs, and Taiwanese cookie cutter engineering, but it is still not reaching the level of Japanese notebook brands before 2008.

I could've vouched for Panasonic, but they don't have 45W models. And despite their still excellent quality, they are not aiming at the power user demographics, like programmers.

Can't we buy directly the Qinghua Tongfang hardware from some place like Aliexpress, or from a higher volume/lower margin reseller like Walmart or Bestbuy?

Walmart had Tongfang laptops by the way under different labels

These Ryzen chips look like game changers for laptops. Intel has stagnated for so long in comparison. Preliminary reports show near desktop performance for the Ryzen chips, and they blow Intel mobile chips out of the water - like 200% faster and much better thermals for sustained computing. On the downside, I've read rumors that Intel is leveraging its OEM relationships to keep AMD processors out of top of the line models such as Thinkpad X1. Intel is also preventing AMD laptops from using TB3. So it seems the options for an AMD laptop right now will remain limited - but I hope this will improve over the next year or so as demand increases for the cheaper and faster AMD laptops. You should not be buying an Intel laptop anymore IMO.

Meanwhile I would be happy if my AMD GPU was able to support OpenGL 4.1 like it used to do with fxglr, instead I have to be happy that it does OpenGL 3.1 at all with Mesa 20, or reboot into Windows to enjoy DirectX 11.

Which GPU do you have? According to https://mesamatrix.net the radeonsi driver for GCN and RDNA cards supports OpenGL 4.6 (the latest), and the r600 driver for older TeraScale cards supports 4.5.

Which given my hint about FXGLR doesn't do me much good.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-hd-6310-igp.c22...

With fxglr, I enjoyed OpenGL 4.1, hardware video decoding, even though as you see from the specs, it can do more than that on Windows.

With the wonderful open source driver, I get OpenGL 3.1 without hardware video acceleration.

Do you mean fglrx?

Regardless, the problem is nobody wants to spend development time supporting 10+ year old cards when there isn't enough time to support all the features on newer cards.

Indeed, which proves the point that having FOSS drivers is just publicity if there isn't anyone willing to do the job.

My laptop works perfectly fine, so the consequence is me switching to Windows, where Asus still keeps its DirectX 11 drivers for the laptop up to date for Windows 10, although the laptop was bought during Windows 7 days.

Or that whoever manufactured the device didn't care about supplying/maintaining drivers for Linux so the community is left maintaining them. There's nothing stopping the device manufacturer from spending the time to support the device like they do on Windows, they just don't think it's worth it due to the smaller market share (which makes sense from a business perspective).

I have never heard of Slimbook and most of what I can find on Google is in Spanish. Are they any good? Do they design the laptops or are they rebranded like System76's Clevo made laptops?

Someone at Phoronix[1] forums suspected it to be made by TongFang. Seems to be same laptop which Tuxedo[3] is also selling.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/hunyv6/my_mechr... [3] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...

At the moment, Qinghua Tongfang is pretty much the only major OEM using AMD.

Also sold as the Schenker Via 15 Pro [1]. Wonder if it will also come with a 4K OLED display option (Tuxedo will also offer one on the configurator within a week).

[1] https://bestware.com/en/schenker-via-15-pro.html

I had a Slimbook 1.

I had some issues with it, most notably the touchpad was not recognized as such but as a regular mouse, so I could not use synaptic to disable the touchpad while I was typing on the keyboard, super annoying. Also, the keyboard layout was weird. If I understand correctly, it's a mac layout (I never had a mac, so it was surprising to me), and a few keys were mislabeled, although not very annoyingly (their shift label and normal label were reversed). But all in all, for a first iteration, it was a good machine.

After that one, I got a librem 13 v3, and it was terrible. Lot of issues, the one year and a half laptop is in the same state a five year old laptop would be, with screws going through the case and the laptop sometimes just powering off by itself (without it being ACPI/heat related). I'm nostalgic of my slimbook.

EDIT: after all of that, I decided from now on to buy refurbished laptops checking on IFixIt which is the most repairable and upgrade it/change battery.

Unfortunately cloudflare has blocked my access to https://kde.slimbook.es/ :(

We're sorry, 50% of the internet is not available to you.

1. Please try again later.

2. Please solve 10 captchas to train our machine learning stuff so you can access it.

3. Please use our Google (TM) login to get tracked on every breath you take. We have to see you are breathing because robots don't breathe.

4, Please volunteer to your ISP to find the other customers with hacked computers that are sending spam with the ip that was rotated to you, and clean their pc.

This is too real.

Especially captcha hell with absolutely no way out if you get rotated a 'bad' IP.

This is a systematic problem when you use tor.

I would really like a journalist to investigate this, by the way. The goal of a captcha is to prove you're human. What is the goal of 10 captcha in a row?

I can make two hypothesis:

1. it's meant to discourage humans from using privacy preserving tools like tor, so it would be basically an agressive action to prevent them to access the content and force them to abandon their privacy tools

2. it could be a mean to identify the user by doing behavioral fingerprinting, by checking their movement speed, time of pattern recognition, etc, based on multiple inputs.

I can't think of a case where such practice is not malicious and would not require scrutiny.

Same for me, I just get an Access denied page.

I’ve been looking at Lenovo and Asus/Acer equivalents of this and must say that this crop of Ryzen chips seems to be very decent.

However, most of the interesting models seem to be unavailable outside the US, as most brands dump older hardware revisions as “back to school” gear in Europe.

So this might be an alternative if you want a 48XX now...

Yeah I've been on t495 for almost a year and, it's a blasphemy I know, but i'm happy I upgraded from t420.

And I know people with intel-based thinkpads (both linux and windows) complaining about horrible performance because intel power management.

Hopefully the trend will continue I used to put intel everywhere but today I have no problems with AMD (especially on linux).

That said my t495 came faulty from factory (trackpoints button not working properly) the quality issues are well documented if you search for that (iirc toms hardware chief editor wrote about that as well) but they changed it for me for free and upgraded to ryzen7 for free as well, that's a fair deal I would say.

Looks rather nice, but "up to 5 hours battery with real use" for the 14" model is pretty awful, to put it mildly. They should get a lot more running time from a 47Wh battery than 5h. Only one USB-C port (apparently without charging support?) is pretty stingy, too. And one of the USB-A ports is only USB 2.0? WTF

I would rather be glad them being so honest.

We have a laptops with even smaller batteries from major brands who claim 10+ hours battery life.

13 inch LG Gram used to have a microscopic battery, while they claimed 16 hours of life from it. They got into quagmire with press coverage, and nearly doubled the battery size in the next generation.

Half of battery life on a modern laptop is basically battery size/screen size, and you can't do anything about it except adding a bigger battery.

It's still possible to make a laptop with terrible battery life if you get a single "power hog" part.

For an Intel system, a CPU, and its VRM may take less than 1W in idle, but a bad WiFi card, DP-LVDS bridge, USB hub, Thunderbolt chip, SSD, or terrible power supply can easily blow the power budget above 6-9W in idle.

Even seemingly innocuous parts like SD card readers, keyboard/touchpad controllers, sensors, wacom chips, embedded controllers can be very bad at idle power consumption, to the extent they take more power than idling CPU.

Sure, some manufacturers claim outrageous battery life numbers that noone has ever managed to achieve outside of a lab. But my 2017 X1 Carbon with a 57Wh battery does manage close to 10 hours of actual light-ish use (with Linux). Macbooks' running times are apparently pretty close to what Apple claims, too. But 5 hours advertised running time is just bad, even if it actually manages that much.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I've never come close to the battery life numbers that Apple claims.

Same here... I have brought several laptops back to the store 'for repair' just for that but there is never anything wrong and I really get miserable battery life out of macbooks. Devving + browsing.

I bet I could get my MacBook’s battery life down to 5hrs with Slack, Chrome, WhatsApp, and VSCode all running, while “not doing anything that demanding”. Use Safari, use native-code messengers or open them only as-needed in response to alerts on my phone, and use Sublime and it’s back to approaching 10hrs.

JavaScript eats battery and Safari is the only of the three major macOS browsers that takes power use seriously. If you live in webapps and Electron you’re gonna have battery trouble no matter what.

Most things we have to use for work have no native equivalents though. I would be i3wm all the way if I could but most of everything is browser (badly done so even taking more battery power) or Electron. I mean how horrible is postman and yet everyone insists on using that pool of bugs.

That said, my linux laptops, where I use the same apps and where I have no safari, have far better battery life. So it is not only that.

Webapp or otherwise JS-and-media-heavy browsing in anything other than Safari easily takes 2hrs off my battery life on a MacBook. Chrome and FF are power hogs.

> 0 hours of actual light-ish use (with Linux)

There is Linux and there is Linux. Do you run KDE? It's basically the heaviest DE around, so it's bound to impact power-management.

I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome 3 is heavier these days, and Plasma even beats XFCE on some metrics. It's actually quite easy on the battery.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...

I am in the process of replacing an harddisk, so I evaluated the GNOME, XFCE and KDE flavous of Ubuntu LTS with live editions.

GNOME has really progressed since the 18.04 LTS days, but I am still on the edge of going back to it (currently I use XFCE).

JavaScript everywhere since version 3 and adamant refusal to support shaded windows is what puts me off. If I wanted that I would be using ChromeOS.

This is obvious running on weak hardware or constrained VMs. Modern Gnome is nearly unusable, while KDE is fine down to fairly low specs, especially if you dial down the animations.

It was like this on Plasma 4 after it had stabilized also.

I think that’s an out-dated viewpoint. KDE is relatively light now afaik.

In my experience, the desktop doesn't matter that much. I typically get over 8 hours on my 47Wh battery 13" HP Envy.

Watching powertop, the biggest consumers for my battery after the screen are:

- the keyboard backlight (1W)

- bluetooth left on

- pulseaudio needing a restart (fuck pulseaudio's session management)

- iwlwifi power saving mode being misconfigured

- Skype

If any of these situations are happening then I only get 4 to 6 hours. Short bursts of CPU/GPU activity like desktop transitions don't last long enough to make a significant impact.

Other than Skype being poorly written, this stuff could all be automatically detected by a daemon or by the software itself.

Yeah, the first thing I noticed is that it uses the high power Ryzen variant, the 4800H, instead of the more efficient 4750U. At load, the difference is 45W vs 15W according to AMD.

Prolly explains the cheapness.

They're issues, but I think they're fairly minor issues. I paid comfortably more than twice as much for a MBP and I only use one of the USB-C ports, admittedly for charging too. And it's pretty permanently plugged in for power - once in a blue moon I need to be mobile with it.

I'd probably have bought two if they were out when I was looking last year. Wish them plenty of success, because there aren't many competitors out there with Linux as a first class OS.

USB-C really needs to support charging + displayport altmode (simultaneously if possible, to plug in something like this: https://www.amazon.de/Cable-Matters-DisplayPort-Multiport-Ad...)

They could probably do a bit better, but coming from mbpro land, 5 hours seems to be standard. It's what my old 2013 and my current 2019 mbpro (with 100wh battery) lasts with light use. Nowhere near close to the 11 hours Apple touts and there's no way it would ever achieve that. It sometimes runs out of battery after sleeping just a few hours. Maybe Slimbook's just being honest for once and not claiming ridiculous numbers like other manufacturers, numbers that are simply pulled out of their asses.

Looks very nice, perhaps the replacement for my MacBook when it finally dies.

No one pointed out: Ryzan!

This is pretty cool. Are there any other laptops with linux on them out there ?

Dell XPS do Ubuntu editions with support.

That's a pretty easy search to do I think.

Slimbook and Tuxedo Computers are selling similar rebranded models in the European market, and Purism and System76 in the US.

From the major brand names, Lenovo is supposed to have preinstalled linux as an option for their T line, and there's Dell also that sells the XPS Developer edition.

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