StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop
starlabs.systems
starlabs.systems
It's available with an AMD or Intel processor, there aren't any strange ergonomic decisions (other than the stow-able web-cam). In particular, they centered they trackpad + keyboard, and it looks like it has decent thermals. The battery is rated for 18 hours. You can choose between a medium resolution, high frame rate display (UHD @ 165Hz) or a 4K 60Hz display. The screen is matte. They claim it POSTs in under a second.
The only real downside is the 4-5 month lead time. Am I missing something?
Exactly. No real laptops so far; no videos with honest in-depth reviews; no information on the dirability of these machines.
If something is too good to be true, it likely is.
Because every channel I have seen on anything...Is claiming independent reviews, while getting product test samples loaned for 1 or 2 years. Engaging on a direct contact with the marketing departments of the vendors, and working under the certainty that if they ever do a thoughtful and true review with a bad rating, the vendor wont send any more samples.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28608132
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/y95kt4/what_...
(Star Labs has been around for years making Linux laptops)
Laptops with similar specs and features (minus coreboot) are available 25% to 50% cheaper from vendors that care a lot less about Linux support.
The models I've seen from Dell and Lenovo with 4k screens and 64 GB ram tend to be in the 2500 EUR range.
And, for some reason, you usually can't get this much RAM and a 4k screen with an AMD CPU.
HP has EliteBooks with upgradeable RAM (both slots!) so you could do your own upgrade, but you'd have to put up with a ridiculously crappy screen. I also don't know if they've upgraded to ryzen 6000.
They have, I'm typing on one. The display I have is crappy BUT they have four or five different displays in the 14" 16:10 format and swapping one for another is relatively simple.
On my Gen8 model, I have the "high-end" display. It's admittedly very bright, but the colors and viewing angles are terrible. Some say it's because it has the privacy screen. That may be the case for the viewing angles, but the colors are atrocious even judging by the specs. At work, they have no privacy screens and colors still suck. At best, you get something like 72% NTSC (which is smaller than sRGB). The Gen9 models I see on their French website have a 16:10 ratio (which, I think, is great) but only... 45% NTSC!
If anyone is interested in unusably tiny and/or slow SSDs, let me know because right now they're just going in e-waste.
(I have similar beef with drinks in restaurants at, e.g., ~100x markup for tap water. Why not just charge a normal price for both the food and the drinks, instead of me having to guess at how much I should be spending on drinks to compensate the normal-priced food? Or make both cheap and charge a table fee, whatever floats their boat. This incentivizes people to not drink enough; usually it's calories where people overingest, not hydration!)
It's often not offered because it sounds like asking for a free drink instead of paying ~13 euros per liter which seems to be the average norm. Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water (edit: that means bottled/branded; the default they'll bring you if unspecified), which in turn is the same price as any soft drink (demonstrating that the price has nothing to do with cost, it must be paying for the table or something but it doesn't say so I don't know).
Anyway, it's more about places charging dishonest prices to seemingly cover for something else, leaving the consumer to guessing why in the world this might cost so much and just going with another option. I can't imagine it achieves the intended goal, so it doesn't seem like a good idea for either party. If anyone ever did finances for a restaurant or has a better-than-guessing idea why SSDs are priced this way, I'd be very curious.
I don't think I'll be able to make sense of what you're saying until you explain what you mean by "normal water". Are you referring to branded bottled water?
Yeah. The company is three people with practically no money at hand. I can't imagine this being real. Check "full accounts made up to 28 February 2022" https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... with cash at hand being just 13,887 pounds. How on earth are you making a laptop from that? Framework started with a nine million seed round and had the former head of hardware at Oculus as the founder for expertise in this field. Now, almost eight figures is prolly overkill but I have hard time imagining low five figures being enough. It doesn't mean there's malicious intent here, they just might not be fully aware of the challenges here and will find themselves in way over their head.
Note there's no doxxing here, the CRN is on the contact us page: https://starlabs.systems/pages/contact-us
>In 2017, we started using Clevo as a supplier. The result was; the Star Lite Mk I, the Star LabTop Mk II and the Star LabTop Pro Mk I. There were a vast array of options to chose from in these laptops, from wireless to memory to pre-installed distribution. You may be familiar with Clevo as they have a lot of resellers across the world. It was a step in the right direction but they left something to be desired when comparing them to the competition - the batteries were small, the bezels were big and modern standards such as USB-C charging were not available.
>We had to build our own. When 2018 came around, we started working on our very own laptops. We used a variety of suppliers, design houses and factories. It was 6 long months of tooling and testing on repeat until two new laptops were born in December 2018; the Star Lite Mk II and the Star LabTop Mk III.
Simply put, they have the same business model as any other small brand for laptops, and that business model does not involve owning your own factories. Now, their small size and limited financial resources certainly casts doubt on their ability to provide ongoing support for their products, but it doesn't preclude getting a product out the door in the first place.
Apple does not own their own factories.
A laptop isn't special. The most special part is the motherboard, and those are a dime a dozen designs. The bios soft is the other big component, but given the right partnerships I could see a small company just paying to use one out of a dozen various vendors.
The rest of the work is part sourcing.
However doing this at small scale is very difficult to do cost-effectively.
So, my guess is that they used income to build up stock of their clevo lines in order to reduce delivery times and increase their market to delivery sensitive customers, and now they are leveraging that to invest in the custom versions. If they are doing their own sw and there product is an integration of off the shelf parts, maybe it's doable.
Edited to add:
Actually I misread the statement, they have 200k falling due in a year and a further 700k of debt. So that's nearly 1M of investment, which seems easily enough to do this development, given it's much less complex than the framework devices.
I genuinely root for them.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Star+Labs+Systems/@51.1863...
If they are successful, they'll eventually hire someone and likely get some polish on those details.
It's, yes, potentially also fraudulent if they don't remotely live up to the claims. In a world of "fake it til you make it" where most small shops have little hope of competing with people with VC money, it's counterintuitive for most people that click bait style PR can come back to bite you.
/2 cents
How on Earth could a customer looking up a vendor's business information be construed doxxing? Do you guys -- I'm asking sincerely, I'm feeling extraordinarily confused and out-of-touch -- think there's some of genuine privacy interest here that you'd wish to respect? Some sort of "right to anonymous business", where you can hide all your sketchiness behind a shell company and people need to *morally* respect your wishes?
Because, if I heard someone "doxxed" a company's ownership and financial documents non-consensually, all I'd have to say to them is "good on you, Wall Street Journal".
You still need to provide your home address to companies' house but it isn't available to the public at large as easily.
This is not just possible it is an extremely good idea. Mobile phone companies in the UK are very lax about opening contracts (UK has an aversion to government identity cards, so defaults to "give us a utility bill" like you can't find templates online) and using a valid name/address combination is what scammers love to do. So if you want to avoid getting "welcome to" letters from every mobile provider in the UK 3x over (and your credit rating subsequently trashed) then using a service address is a great idea.
I think "doxxing" has in some cases evolved from a sometimes-necessary norm in pseudonymous forums to a context-free knee-jerk reaction to somebody's details being out there.
I appreciate the norm when it allows people to safely be themselves among pseudonymous peers. Yes, by all means let's keep each other feeling safe. But like you, when somebody is doing business with the public, I think we should expect to know who they are. It seems insane to me that MrSquanchy69 can take in gobs of money, execute a rugpull, and have people saying, "bUt WhAt aBOuT tHeIr PriVAcY?!?" Public impact and public accountability go hand in hand.
If you want public accountability, then start with the legislators.
I'll give you an example, the state claims to have the publics interest at heart, especially kids, so why dont they teach law to kids at school?
You cant assume parents have the best interests of their kids at heart. Some state employees will abuse their own kids in order to further the science that wouldn't have got past a University's ethics board!
Where is the public holding the state to account, when it hides behind its own legislated secrecy?
So when you say "by all means let's keep each other feeling safe" do you really mean that or are just satisfying some subconscious desire to divide people?
Lots of businesses run out of disused farm buildings, its cheap space.
Google started from a garage in someone's home. Many businesses run from people's spare bedroom.
What purpose is the doxxing serving other than drawing attention to a location?
Google used to do way more doxxing of people in the early days, like displaying content behind password protected forums on people.
Dont see Google getting called out about that do we?
I mean yes, you talk about some good things. Legislators should be more accountable. I'm already on record as advocating not only for the existing financial transparency at the federal level, but that elected officials should have every financial transaction be part of a public record while they're in office and for years after. Because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
For the same reason, people taking money from the public should be on public record. This is hardly novel. When I had a PO box years ago, the USPS would doggedly protect the privacy of box-holders. But if you were doing business with the public using the box, you didn't get the same protections, because they didn't want people using PO boxes to scam the public and then vanish.
I think forum anti-doxing etiquette is perfectly fine for the contexts in which it originated. But when we enter the public sphere of money and power, I think transparency is an important check on all sorts of malfeasance.
Fully upgradable SSD and raM as well, I have 64 gigs and the touchpad is really really good.
Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great. My 2.5 year old Dell is currently with Dell for out of warranty repairs. I have no other windows machines left. All of them had an 4ish year lifespan are now dead and were not worth fixing. Current machine not withstanding; it’s too young to die.
Edit: I will add that I’m perfectly happy with my other windows machines, just that the build quality was such that I their natural lifespan was simply shorter.
My XPS13 is going strong after years of abuse and being lugged around the world in hand luggage.
My old powerbook and ibook (remember those?!) Both had live current running through the case screws which caused a stingy shock on bare legs.
I've never seen an Apple laptop that didn't look nice but ultimately have weird issues
Last time I looked at second hand laptops. Most of those the +5y old macbooks in the market had huge issues / defects (and also looked like shit) while you could find a lot of decent refurbished thinkpads and HP elitebook from the same era with no advertized defects (and those I bought didn't have any). I am excluding battery life as regarldess of the brand all needed a brand new one.
So they seem to be the gold standard when new. But they certainly don't age so well.
MacBooks may use some nice materials, and their processors are interesting, but for a customer like me that prefers to install the hardware and software of my choice either today or in ten years, they have no products I'm interested in.
I've never had to sell or retire any machine I've had in the last twenty years, they're all somewhere doing something right now.
My Macs usually stay at home if I have a more rugged machine to take with me, just for the peace of mind. It's probably a matter of personal distrust, but I'm a clumsy guy...
A second hand T-series is still what I'd default to if I need a laptop for now (especially for the keyboard), but I'm aware that this is likely not going to forever remain the obvious choice it used to be.
But in years past a mbp and an imac that never fell an inch killed themselves from the bad video chips, which Apple and their supposedly gold standard support refused to warranty and by the time they lost in court years later the damage was already done and cost various friends the price of new machines.
Other that those famous examples like that and the keyboards, just in general among all the machines I intersect with, the Apples don't fare any better. They all get busted screens, busted ports, busted hinges, exploded batteries. In fact HP and Apple seem to have to most cases of glued in batteries that expand and break the rest of the machine.
That doesn't work very well if there's more than one of you trying to watch...
I have a 7.1.4 system at home and obviously there's no comparison but they sound good enough for most series I watch when I'm on the go - mostly on travels.
They're also very good for meetings. I find them much better than any enterprise equipment (Jabra etc) I've ever used.
Sure, good headphones will usually sound better, but I'd rather not have my ears covered all the time. To each their own, I guess.
I'd still mostly rather not wear anything most of the time. This is especially true those times when the laptop speakers prove the most useful - when I'm just chilling out, possibly in bed. I'd also rather not have to deal with wires during those times.
My main issue is not so much warmth but mostly the fact that my ears are covered, simple as that. I'm not neurotic about it but I prefer to have them open. Sometimes I'll take the sound quality hit and wear my bone conducing headset over wearing great sounding headphones.
didn't feel that about any touchpad before the macbook, and it's why we loved thinkpad's so much because at least they gave you a nub
I would love to see Linux laptop that works like that.
1.4 kg, so considerably heavier than the LG gram 16 (that unfortunately isn't available in 32G+) but also far from being an outlier in the other direction
- Matte only option is a weird default over a glossy screen with an optional matte screen protector
- Corporate pricing (+324 gbp to go from 32gb to 64gb ram)
- Keyboard looks like crap
- Only 1 year warranty
- Like you said, 4-5 month lead time
- Plastic?
Basically, you can get better for less, with next day delivery
OK, so you are not interested in games, machine learning, 8k60, or any other thing that depends on a dedicated GPU.
But you are willing to blow $2000 on a laptop. That's a very niche situation.
And yet, people want quality hardware, good screens, comfortable input devices, and snappy enough hardware to either do work on them or consume online content without going blind.
I'm looking to replace a T490 to improve on the shitty screen that came with it, get a faster CPU with moar cores to compile code faster, and take advantage of the latest iGPU performance jump to drive the 4k display. That's pretty much it.
Turns out in that nearly 10 years I've hardly used the dGPU at all. The only time I have it enabled is because it's necessary for driving an external display. The things I've run on it in practice just don't use much GPU.
For compute-intensive things I ended up using big, rented servers, which got faster while my laptop aged. For desktop graphics the iGPU has been adequate, and I ended up not really playing games or doing any ML, simulations or video encoding on it. Compiling, editing, filesystem things, code analysis, data storage and indexing, those don't need GPU at all. The browser does but in practice it's so CPU and memory bound, the dGPU vs iGPU difference is not something I've noticed affect browsing.
One game I played for a while, Tux Racer, did work better with dGPU enabled, but that's not enough reason to buy one if it's an optional and expensive feature. However in practice on a MBP you needed the dGPU to get max specs for the other components, which I needed (in fact the RAM was never enough), so it was still a good choice.
For a short while I had a 15” laptop with a high power AMD CPU and high power Nvidia GPU (5900HS/3080) and while the power was nice, it was much more noisy and hot than I prefer in a laptop so I returned it. Now if I need graphical muscle I turn to a tower, which can provide that in vast quantities with a fraction of the fan noise.
If you prefer you can disable the dGPU too.
The keyboard is offset to the left because of the extra row of vertical keys on the right, so touch typists will have their right hand shifted toward the left more than normal. But the trackpad is still centered on the frame... so the right hand will be greatly overlapping the trackpad.
Visually, having the trackpad centered relative to the G/H keys would look imbalanced, but it would be ergonomic. But unfortunately they went for visual style over ergonomics on this one.
But happy that I have the Framework now and thus don't need to choose :D
Other than that, I would not mind paying a premium for a well made laptop with these specs. Still hoping System76 will get there someday.
Other than that it looks good. Kudos for the matte screen the framework doesn't offer.
- Surely not every old program available from the repositories will work with display scaling, will they? I've never had to use it, maybe Xorg has some hack to scale certain windows at 2x so you don't need support from individual packages. I'm also thinking of things like Burp Suite, which have window-like objects that interact horribly with things like i3 (from what I see with colleagues), so those might have similar issues when you have to tell Xorg to scale individual windows up. Is this something you run into?
- How much of an impact does that resolution have on battery life and GPU performance? I do not need more than 1920x1080 pixels on a 16" diagonal, my eyes can hardly read small fonts on that DPI as it is (I'm ~30) and they're not going to get better with age. This laptop ships with either double or quadruple that, making me wonder what the trade-off is like of having this (for me) gimmick. Surely it doesn't double/quadruple the battery drain or halve/quarter the performance compared to a normal screen?
- I also don't see flickering at 60 Hz (heck, 24 Hz TV looks smooth to me), so 165 Hz seems again like a battery drainer and performance reducer. How much of an impact does it have to try and render 2.75x as many frames per second on a GPU? Does it simply use 2.75x more power for the GPU or reduce the number of drawing operations you can do on the GPU by 2.75 times, or does this not work that way?
Edit: this is currently at the top, but I don't want the top comment to be criticism. This product is awesome in virtually every other regard besides shipping time. Good physical size, decent number of USB ports, customization of the keyboard, c-c-coreboot?! Officially supported? I am definitely impressed. Heck, even the payment methods impress me, being able to select iDeal at a small foreign shop.
- I don't have a 4k display on a laptop so can't comment on battery life. But for "desktop use" (read: non gaming) GPU performance has been fine for a long time. I have an old desktop at work with a 4th gen i5 and whatever the integrated GPU was at the time. It can drive a 4k panel at 60 Hz just fine. A somewhat newer laptop, 8th gen i5 with a uhd620 integrated GPU could drive its internal FHD panel and an external UHD display without any issue.
- For your eyes comment: the small fonts may be illegible because they're blurry. On FHD screens, I've found that bitmap fonts are much more legible at small sizes. I've seen some Dell with a 4k display at work, probably 15", and the small text was much more legible than on my 14" FHD laptop (compared using Windows 11 - the guy was a Windows dev).
- TV has a blurriness to its movement, so it looks smooth enough because it's never actually sharp. The point of higher refresh rates is not "flickering", but a smooth movement. Try reading a scrolling page on a 30 Hz, 60 Hz, 120 Hz screen. I mostly look at static text on my screens, so 60 Hz works well enough for me, and I prefer higher resolution / better colors to higher refresh rates. Don't know how this affects GPU usage, though I don't expect it to be "free".
Older ones will simply ignore the scaling settings and draw the interface 1-to-1. One such application that comes to mind is VMWare's remote console (for esx). I haven't used it in a few years, but I remember at the time it was painful to run on a 24" UHD screen.
On the windows side, I think things are somewhat better than on Linux, but there still is confusion, including Windows 11 22h2's start menu. If you start the computer in 100% mode, then plug an external screen scaled at 200%, it works OK for the app list (what it shows on first click) but if you start typing everything becomes a blurry mess.
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Edit: I actually think QT is one of the better toolkits, at least on Linux, in the case of scaling. IIRC it's able to adapt the scaling based on the screen DPI reported by X, so a full qt desktop should be able to handle situations like a high-DPI laptop connected to a low-dpi monitor.
Wayland, after much feet dragging (why this wasn't a day-1 feature for a supposed Xorg replacement is beyond me), finally managed to cobble together basic support for non-integer scaling [0], so it should finally Just Werk (tm), regardless of if you scale at 2x, 1.75x, etc. without looking like a blurry mess.
I don't have experience with 4k displays in laptops, but I will say this: considering AMD's ongoing problems with idle power draw on >120 Hz displays [1], I'd recommend not getting the 165 Hz display if you're getting an AMD CPU.
[0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/k92b2x/psa_if_you_have...
Yeah that's my colleagues! This is why half the monitors in the office are not being used :D. Someone thought it was a great idea to get three or four 4k screens but only one person actually wants them; everyone wants their laptop as a second or third screen. (Personally I'm a single-screen type of person anyway, but what made me commandeer a 1080p screen is the very noticeable lag that my 2018 i5 Lenovo had when trying to drive a 4k screen with or without display scaling. Got a new work laptop now that ought to not have that problem, but I haven't bothered trying yet.)
Anyhow, thanks for the pointers! Especially that 120 Hz AMD thing sounds like a big caveat.
This is on i3wm btw
I am using a Framework with 1.5x scaling using Fedora KDE and it’s amazing. Didn’t find any app yet that doesn’t conform. One difference to years ago is Wayland vs X. With X it was a constant struggle for me while with Wayland and more years invested, scaling became a non-issue on Linux (for me).
Regarding burp suite, iirc this is a JVM based app. I am running Jetbrains products without any issues and no configuration needs. Assuming burp suite uses swing, I would assume no issue. Generally, you can quickly check with a VM. Using Fedora KDE is a great „Just Works“ experience.
If you double the DPI it's going to be easier to read those fonts.
For some visual impairments, though, the improved sharpness from higher DPI may be basically undetectable, which sounds like what you're reporting.
From their configuration site:
"The 4K display consumes more power, averaging 8W but provides incredible detail and excellent scaling support that allows you to change the UI (User Interface) to a size that's comfortable for almost everyone.
The QHD display supports a refresh rate of 165Hz, which offers a silky smooth experience. It consumes less than half the power of the 4K display at 3.2W. Limited scaling support on Linux means that the UI on this display is relatively small compared to other display resolutions"
It seems like the QHD display would be the way to go for lower power. I'd guess the power would be lower if you didn't run it at the full 165Hz refresh (there's probably a 60Hz mode)...
It is close to twice the number of pixels.
1080p = 2.073.600
1440p = 3.686.400
2160p = 8.294.400
For one thing, it affects the latency from human input to graphics output. How the graphics stack is implemented, especially with modern desktop compositors, there's typically at least 3 frames of latency. 3/60 is 50ms. 3/165 is 18ms. Whether or not you consciously notice it, the 165hz display is going to feel more instant when you push a button.
There's also what's referred to as "judder". When you're watching 24Hz video content on a 60Hz display, the frames of video get repeated 3 times, then 2 times, then 3 times etc. This results in a 16ms "judder" from frame to frame. It's subtle, and has been the norm for decades, but it is quantifiably less than ideal. A 165Hz display drops judder down to 6ms.
Another aspect of the refresh rate has to do with the frequency response of the display technology itself, and what many might call "smoothness". Looking back at CRT technology, the image is instantaneous wherever the electron beam is currently pointed. The overall image looks stable due to persistence within the human eye. If you film a CRT, it can look pretty wonky. With a CRT, 30Hz is too slow because pretty much everyone can see the flicker. 60Hz is borderline on a CRT, and I personally can see the flicker in my peripheral vision. Motion looks smooth regardless, though, because all the persistence is in your eyes. With traditional LCDs, the pixels are always on, and they are relatively slow to change; there's persistence in the display itself. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, and all motion looks blurry no matter what. It just sucks other than being a conveniently flat screen. With modern LCDs and OLED displays, the pixels are still always on, but they are back to being very fast to change. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, but motion is no longer blurry, but instead of flickering it looks jerky rather than smooth. At 60Hz things look pretty smooth, but you're still at the limit of some folk's peripheral vision.
A GPU doesn't have to render frames at the refresh rate. An old frame will be repeated if there isn't a new frame ready yet. If the GPU can't keep up, a 165Hz display effectively becomes an 82.5Hz display, or a 41.25Hz display. There certainly is going to be a power penalty in the GPU circuitry driving the display at a higher rate, but it's marginal vs. the cost of rendering the frames themselves. 82Hz is still luxury compared to 60Hz, in that it's better than good enough for 99% of people.
What it boils down to is that pushing the refresh rate higher gives the GPU/software more fine grained control over the display than otherwise. That control allows the software to optimize latency, judder, and smoothness better than the display itself can given a lower refresh rate.
My current laptop is still performing well enough unfortunately, but ask me again in six months when the units are in and available to be shipped, and good odds that I'll hit that purchase button!
Not sure whether to re-post it there or flag my own comment or something.
I really want to see a company do something compelling here but there is always one thing that's off...pricing, screen, last gen processors. I switched back to Linux last year and ended up getting a $900 Lenovo that has been excellent. Would have tried System76 or Framework if their hardware could keep up.
When I had keyboard issues I had my laptop flown out with 1 day overnight shipping and the same back to me. When the refurb I purchased has a loose hinge, I got a full refund with no hassle. When my laptop was stolen during delivery, I got a replacement sent out with a 12 minute phone call.
I suspect this small operation cannot match this.
I also own a Framework laptop, and the 3:2 aspect ratio is a killer feature for me. It's really hard to go back to 16:10 after using that for a while.
But that is with i3 and 240G SSD?! My base config is 2300GBP, that is ridiculous. Then waiting the minimum of 4-5 months (for some on Twitter over 12 months and still waiting). After giving out this ammount having nothing for looong time. To a 4 person startup in debt and being sligtly longer in the market than the delivery window.
No way, it will never work.
I think a lot of people would pay extra for assembly in a western country. These appear made to order, so the risk of hardware implantation targeting is almost certainly real.
[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2059/5897/products/StarFig...
https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/why-choose-us
Assembled, imaged and programmed in the UK.
Configured by our own engineers, giving you peace of mind that you get what you want with no hidden extras.
Not sure if that's outdated or what to believe.
If you go to their twitter, its a constant barrage of angry customers who havent received their orders in over a year.
I dont think im okay with shelling out $3000, waiting possibly over a year, and being told "we are working on it" the entire time.
I personally just went with Tuxedo for a linux first laptop.
Problem is, I'm not confident it actually will exist.
The webcam decision is wonky. My Thinkpad has a little cover I can slide over the webcam. I can buy aftermarket stick-on covers too. Why the complex magnetic mess + storage compartment?
I do that often even on thinkpad with physical buttons.
I’d expect the same tbh.
I elaborate: a faulty RAM chip happens. If it's socketed I buy a new chip and replace it. It might take a few days, about 100 Euros, problem solved. With soldered RAM I'm expecting to have to either buy a new motherboard from a company that by the time might even don't exist anymore or find some repair center able to dissolder the faulty chip and solder the new one. Time and cost are much worse.
I would think about it if this was HP, with on site next business day support, but they are not. And even with HP, what happens after support is over, which is typically three cheap years plus increasingly costly extensions? Last time I checked I got a quote for (I think) some 400 euro for a keyboard replacement. I bought a keyboard myself and replaced it. This brings us to the availability of spare parts, which might be a risk for this brand.
All considered this is not a laptop I can use to make money with.
Unfortunately, the StarFighter has soldered memory, which is one of the main drawbacks of new ThinkPad models. Star Labs also sells the mid-range StarBook laptop with replaceable memory and the low-end StarLite laptop with soldered memory. On the other hand, Star Labs is Linux-first and pays the developers of the pre-installed Linux distribution configured in the order, which is an advantage over Lenovo for Linux users.
As somebody who plays very few video games and is forever looking up references, I promise that basically everything is now documented.
There seems to be a lot of wishful thinking involved in the lead time estimate.
A quick look on Geizhals[1], gives many alternatives, with better CPU and storage. The only thing that's probably different is the Linux aspect of the laptop.
[1]https://geizhals.eu/?cat=nb&xf=12_16384~2991_480~6752_Core+i...
But 240GB of storage... That's so little, even my phone (POCO X3 Pro) has 256GB and I paid around 220€ for the entire phone. For a computer 240GB just feels almost unusably small, unless if you're running ChromeOS, but that's something completely different.
If you spec a Tuxedo Aura 15 Gen2 (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Notebooks/...) to the same level (not sure what the equivalent to the CPU is for Ryzen though), and although the display isn't 4K its still much less (just over 700, so around half the price...). There are nice features that the StarFighter has than the Aura 15 Gen2 doesn't, but are those features worth basically 2x the price..?
* One of the biggest spec differences is that the Aura uses a Zen2 based 5700U (Lucienne) vs the StarFighter's Zen3+ based 6800H (Rembrandt) so expect a +50% performance difference on MT workloads: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4156vs4749/AMD-Ryzen-7-...
* iGPU is also a big improvement. The 6800H's GPU is about 70% faster on synthetic and 90% faster on gaming benchmarks: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Vega-8-vs-Radeon-680M_10313_11... - it also has a newer VCN engine that supports AV1 decoding among other things
* The Aura has USB3 vs the Starfighter w/ USB4 (again, thanks to the new Ryzen generation), which will give you 40Gbps transfer rates, support for eGPU enclosures, etc
* Better display panels can be hundreds of dollars more expensive (here's a discussion of a $250 price gap for upgrading to a 4K panel from a few years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/XMG_gg/comments/izg598/no_4koled_pa...) - a 600nit vs 300nit display btw, is a world of difference
* 49Wh vs 85Wh battery is a 73% bigger capacity battery. At an equivalent power usage, that'd be the difference between 7h vs 12h of light usage for example and IMO isn't something to scoff at.
* Due I expect primarily due to it's Mg alloy chassis, the Starfighter is actually 250g lighter - 1.4kg vs 1.65kg, which is actually quite impressive for its size and battery capacity. The pogo-pin/removable webcam leads to a sleeker and compact frame that probably helps in shaving off size/weight even if you don't care about the privacy aspect
* While I prefer replaceable SO-DIMMs on my laptops, the Starfighter at least lets you configure w/ 64GB of LPDDR5 so you get the better power efficiency, performance, and weight savings w/o sacrificing upgradability (64GB is the max the Ryzen 6000 platform supports)
* coreboot option vs AMI BIOS - to me this is more of a neat nice to have, but I understand the sort of development commitment/investment in the future this thing is. Here's a discussion on Coreboot for Framework from their forums: https://community.frame.work/t/coreboot-on-the-framework-lap...
* Having been using a Framework w/ a fingerprint sensor that works in Linux for the past half year+ now, I will admit that it's hard to go back to something that doesn't have this, and I'd pay a fair amount extra for this...
Anyway, while you do pay a hefty premium for maxing out the specs (more than the cost of each individual improvement), it actually seems not so egregious when I add it ll up, if only because it seems like no one else is doing it. Of course, this calculus I think changes if delivery gets delayed and/if someone were to release a high-end Ryzen 7040 Linux-friendly laptop (Zen4, RNDA3, Xilinx AI accelerator) before then.
BTW, I think that the Tuxedo Infinity Book Pro 14/16 Gen7 (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-InfinityBook-Pro-1... and https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-InfinityBook-Pro-1...), while Intel-based (12700H), with a bigger battery, better display, better IO, and lighter chassis than the Aura is much more competitive with the StarFighter. Sadly the IBPs don't have a US ANSI keyboard layout...
What does AMD actually implement?
While we're on the topic, why is there basically no public information about Socket FP7 or it's chipset? Nothing on FP7r2 or FP8 either (by the way, upcoming 7xxx mobile chips support all three of these with likely different levels of motherboard capabilities). Why is there not much public for mobile AMD chipsets newer than a decade ago?
I'm sure you can get a BSP contract w/ AMD to get implementation details (or simply have a relationship with a board design partner, but I'm not really sure why there would be an expectation for public information on something that's not really relevant to the general public).
Meanwhile lots of brands are spitting 15"+ laptops with FHD dispalys like it is 2010s. eWaste :(
They probably won't be pleased to learn that the Netherlands, which they seem to have a custom page for so apparently support, doesn't have a minimum duration specified, so you could take them to court if the CPU fails after 5 years since who's ever heard of a CPU failing? Those things usually last decades and so that's what one is also lead to expect if not otherwise advertised. (I don't know of case law in this area, but that's how I've heard consumer law being explained by the consumer market authority consuwijzer and others.)
"1 year limited warranty" for a 2000€ device that usually lasts at least 3, if not 5 years. Do people in the UK commonly put up with that or is the 1 year thing due to their small scale?
"The Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that items must be of satisfactory quality, as described, fit for purpose and last a reasonable length of time. You have these rights for six years in England and Wales or five years in Scotland.
Items must be of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose as described and last a reasonable length of time. So, for example, if you have bought a washing machine and it breaks after two years you should still be able to claim. However a consumer is expected to use the appliance reasonably. For example, a washing machine may be expected to be used a few times a week. It will show if it has been used every day twice a day for two years and this may be considered unreasonable and you would not get a repair or replacement.
For an item such as a washing machine, or a car etc., the retailer can take off money for use. This needs to be a reasonable “amount”.
You should familiarise yourself with the Consumer Rights Act 2015 before paying for any warranty being offered.
It is worth stating I have never paid for or used a warranty. I always assert my legal rights.
A retailer may try and fob you off saying that you should have bought a warranty. But your consumer rights are worth more than any warranty."
https://thecomplainingcow.co.uk/what-is-a-warranty-what-is-a...
These actions would normally void the warranty on most laptops.
The whole point of a warranty is to save me from needing to do those things.
> install an upgrade
Nearly everything inside is either non-upgradeable, pointless to upgrade, or doesn't void other manufacturers warranties (lenovo does not void warranty for replacing ssd) so that's completely meaningless.
That shows to me they don't believe in what they're preaching.
> Media keys for playback, volume, brightness, screenshots and more
and realized they're the usual function keys doubly purposed.
Do you even need to mention it as a feature?
It wasn't, untill Apple intoduced the Macbook Pro with touchbar. Luckily Apple has finally accepted that people don't want it, and is no longer forcing it upon its customers.
Any one knows if it still happens in these DDR5 days?
I'm asking because 6400MHz seems ludicrously high for a guy like me that just last week got some good old 2400MHz sticks for my home server and I'm wondering if it isn't marketing just to show high numbers.
6400 MT/s is similarly beyond the fastest officially supported DDR5 speeds for CPUs. But the fine print reveals that this machine is actually using soldered LPDDR5, which is officially supported at 6400MT/s or higher by pretty much every processor or SoC that uses LPDDR5(x). Ditching the DIMM slots really does make it easier to operate the memory bus at higher speeds.
Star Labs needs to correct their site to not refer to LPDDR5 as DDR5, because they really are different types of memory and only one of them is upgradable by the end user.
Memory numbers are just dumb.
CL32 at 6400MHz (3200MHz doubled) is 10 nanoseconds.
CL2 at 266MHz (133MHz doubled) is 15 nanoseconds.
So the upshot is that if this 6400Mhz device is not overclocked, it shouldn't be unstable.
Max internal clocks on DDR4/5 are about 400MHz. There's a fundamental limit (rapidly diminishing return) to how fast you can drain and charge capacitors.
They try to make up for it by reading/sending entire row(s) at one time and sending quickly over the wire, but that's clearly reliant on cache line optimization of the program and doesn't do much to improve real-world latencies.
Mmhm... Having owned a couple "linux first" laptops now, the cynic in me is saying that they are trying to flip a design limitation into a strength. They wanted slim bezels and to maximize screen real estate. They can't afford to do a notch like apple to get there. The solution? Make the webcam a peripheral and sell it as a privacy boon.
The biggest flaws are this is the tail-end of these CPUs being current gen with the newer chips already announced & the display panel only covers sRGB in a world that's been transitioning to DCI-P3. With the former, it's a shame smaller ODMs & OEMs can't get access to the latest chips like the bigger players. With latter, I just don't know—we have the tech and the eyeballs to perceive more colors but most laptops still aren't embracing it even if phones have latterly moved to wider gamut (which makes using them for content creation subpar).
4th of Ju\y
AZERTY is a crime against humanity.
And only a short while after the M1/M2 are out and Asahi got GPU acceleration working. :D
Intel was so close.
(It also maxes out at 4TB of flash; the MBP can be configured with 8.)
To which Han replies, "I can imagine quite a lot."
Intel® Core® i9-12900H (2.50GHz 14-core / Turbo Boost up to 5.00GHz)
AMD Ryzen™ 7 (3.20GHz 8-core 6800H / Boost clock up to 4.70GHz)
Or does the Intel outperform the Ryzen pretty much unilaterally?
Even back in the day a 33 MHz 486 DX was much faster than a 33 MHz 386 DX.
It’s better to look at benchmarks. Passmark is a good one. Its headline number is good for comparing performance in software that takes advantage of multiple cores. For that reason they also show single core performance to see how a cpu will performance relatively using games and apps that don’t use multiple cores.
Benchmarks for both chips:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-12900...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+6800H&i...
In this case the Intel chip beats the AMD chip both in multi-core and single-core benchmarks.
Otherwise, System76/Clevo are the usual recommendations, along with certain Thinkpad models.
Here's what r/linuxhardware recommends: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1073j9f/reco...
My biggest gripe: I wish it came with 1 USB-A (maybe a micro SD slot).
Source: someone who suffered through the CRT years.
I don’t run games and proprietary drivers are more hassle than anything else.
I am quite curious how on earth "a laptop specially made for linux" will enable to have more performance on same hardware? More thermal pipe or you write your own drive?
Really hope these guys get investigated. From Belgium or French they were.
I was under the impression that the extant laptops from this brand are just rebadges (Clevo - like System76).
It's a big leap from slapping custom badges and boot logos on a Clevo to designing something from scratch.
I don't mind paying more for a laptop from an independent company with linux support, but the price is excessive and I don't even know if what I'm buying is actually good.
Weight is 1.4 kg so a tad heavy (my 17" LG gram is 1.3kg)
If it had an NVidia GPU, it'd be perfect for my purpose.
[EDIT]: argh, I take it back: no numpad, so can't use Blender seriously on it.
All we need is for schools or governments to buy in and we can kill windows
Probably the most complex single device humans can make is a CPU die and you can have a mid-range one for the price of a meal, and this consumer laptop presumably has manufacturing tolerances that would make the people who built spacecraft a few decades ago sweat.
Is that an expensive meal or a cheap CPU? A meal for a family?
My mental model for a mid-range CPU is an i3 (don't forget Pentium / Celeron), and even for those Intel recommends charging $109-119 for the i3-13100F (they had a similar range for the i3-10105F). Even if you go all the way back to the first generation of Intel Core cpus, the i3-530 had a recommended price of $117.
Even if you're buying used + several generations old off eBay, you're still probably paying at least $50. And, note that once you're looking at several generations old hardware, you're really not looking at a mid-range device anymore -- The i3-13100F scores nearly twice as high on PassMark as the i3-10100F, for instance, and higher than the i7-9700F.
It's still orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than anything from the 80s, certainly, but new hardware is not _that_ cheap.
Also, that said, I remember when the Macbook Air first launched -- I know some people who ran the numbers and were impressed they could fit that SSD + RAM + CPU + display + battery in that price envelope.
I don't know how things in Deep America are, but since Herr Putin started his little anschluss, a meal for two in a nice European restaurant can easily run in the 3-digits. And I'm talking nice, not Michelin-nice - for those you'll need 3 digits for each person.
(Actually if you had a unbranding option we could sticker it with our own company logo and that could be pretty cool)
Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile business meeting with an obviously random and non-corporate laptop (oh that looks like some random cheap overseas brand, uhh ok, are you sure you can afford us)?
Real companies have IT provision laptops for employees.
If you are consultant remote, sure just Citrix into the envroment. But if your laptop breaks its on you.
edit: also, would a linux laptop work for you? Wouldn't you need office or such?
It could also take a lot of messing around to get Office 365 MDM working with Linux. I think you'd want to do a Linux desktop deploy and sort out these issues before you tried to deploy [any of these brands of] Linux laptops.
Oh, sweet non-corporate bullshit child.
People get shown the door for just having non-Apple devices with them.
Is this a thing that you've actually personally seen happen? Because I've seen and heard of some fairly messed up companies and that strains credulity. Like, I suppose it happens, because there are enough companies that everything happens, but that feels like the 99th percentile of insane company cultures.
Yes, I saw situations where the things which were not conforming to the status led to... or more like didn't led anywhere.
Also, two things:
1. There are people who scoff off at green bubbles.
2. "It has doors that open like this"
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://media.tenor.com/9GE7Vhf9MAEAAAAd/silicon-siliconvall...
So your proposed solution is to... remove all branding? How does that help anything?
Or ideal scenario, with a brand delete you slap a [company] sticker on it and nobody really notices that it’s not a Dell Latitude running Linux.
I know that Schenker sells some of their laptops with their logo on the laptop lid by default and offers a choice to remove the logo for an additional charge. Example (VIA 15 Pro): https://bestware.com/en/schenker-via-15-pro-m22.html
This option is possible because the laptop is a branded version of an ODM laptop (Tongfang PF5NU1G).
Do they have on-site support like HP,Dell or Lenovo?
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...
You've got it wrong.
Yes, I imagine some prehistoric corporations might have a problem with non corpo laptop.
Luckily the rest of the world has moved on.
[1] https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/status/1574860315254263830
[2] https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/status/1593525807682568192
That's surprising!
Also it's funny how on landing page it mentions 165Hz display, but in specs it is only available as an option and not for the 4K display. Not that it would even be able to drive it properly.
Looking at the specs, it seems like they are trying to build one of the worst possible Linux experiences possible. It lacks only Nvidia GPU to make it absolute garbage. I have one like that at work. Thinkpad with 4K display, and dedicated Nvidia GPU. It's not supposed to run Linux but I tried it anyway and it was very bad.
Xorg also had to implement it, and at one point Xorg's implementation was more stable than what popular Wayland compositors offered.
edit: I looked back at some release notes and it's been more than 2 years that fractional scaling worked. The pandemic has really messed with my sense of time for the last few years.
> And the fact that they expect you to power it with Pentium N5030 processor is laughable. Why even offer such combination?
I wouldn't choose it, but it has a <5W TDP according to the specs, might be a good choice if you're just doing glorified texting/programming and want long battery life.
Also, I don't see an option for a Pentium N5030 in the laptop in the OP.
Is it?
The 16" M2 starts at €3049 and maxed out it is well over €6000.
The 16" Starfighter starts at €1553 and maxed out it is ~€3500.
Also, look at how expensive M2 MBPs are. Spec one out to a comparable laptop in the OP and the MBP will be more expensive.
Okay so privacy nuts who think that removing their webcam and microphone protects from the perceived spyware that is next to them on their desk in the form of an iPhone.
I see nothing good about this. Inexperienced company, inexperienced in manufacturing and hardware design.
Just becoming a fetish at this point.
> Why would I buy this over a lenovo for instance.
Lenovo tells you to install Windows when there is any doubt that it's a software issue, and of course that's an easy doubt to cast. There is no support tier that will support Linux, let alone coreboot. Want to apply firmware updates? Again, get yourself a Microsoft license. At least, that's what I hear from colleagues, I don't have a Lenovo currently.
Also, competition. I'm not sure how many other modern laptops still have 5 USB ports, especially when considering the large 85 Wh battery and the gimmicky screen you get (in case anyone cares about >60 Hz or 4k at 16"). It does seem like a rare combo and not a bad one.
Not sure about your work, but in my field pretty much every person I know who works in industry has their camera taped over. I believe for lots of them this is actually company policy.
In any case, neither your opposition nor my fanboyism will determine crypto's long term success. Only its inherent utility will.