Lenovo ThinkPad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop
theregister.com
theregister.com
I agree that a USB-A port would be nice. Ethernet, maybe, but it's a stretch to ask for that in a thin fanless form factor. But asking for mini Display port or micro HDMI is insane. If you're going to need a dongle to connect to your monitor anyways, then using Type-C for the display output makes way more sense. DisplayPort alt mode is way more common and useful than the miniature versions of dedicated DP or HDMI ports.
Same delta as the engineers who insist smartcard on laptops is optional; yes it _is_, but only for a subset of cheaper customers.
The X13s is only a bit slimmer than my cheap-ass work Dell, and it has one.
My £35 Raspberry Pi 4 (I got in early, OK) has not one but two mini-HDMI ports. So does my 2nd hand RP 400. It's why I own a mini-HDMI to HDFMI adaptor.
This stuff is not hard, it's not expensive, and it's not difficult. It's standard in cheap laptops.
If you only have 2 USB ports at all, using one for power and one for screen means that's it. You're out. No wired keyboard or mouse or network for you.
You can't pass a screen or charging through a generic USB 2 hub, the sort of thing most of us have lying around immediately to hand.
4 USB-C ports, and I might say OK to this: one for power, one for screen, one for network, and one with a hub with the legacy kit plugged in.
If it had plenty of ports, then OK, but it doesn't, it has two, and you can't use them both for non-USB type jobs like power or display and still use anything else.
Once more developers target ARM, this is a nice piece of hardware to compete with the new Air which will push apple even harder to build great laptops. I’m exclusively a Mac user but welcome competition in the space again.
and paying for an office subscription? Why not just use edge on this to use 360 or Google apps online instead?
Windows is great! It's only with arch+hyprland I've found something that could widthstand the competition on the linux desktop
> new Air which will push apple even harder to build great laptops.
Wake me up when they offer OLED + Touchscreen + ECC
Oh wow, that is pretty.
I loved Window, I had a keyboard centric approach using AHK to tile windows/display them borderless and without decorations etc. Each year I tried ubuntu and the latest gnome but they always sucked for various reasons.
Then comes hyprland and wow!!
I don't do exactly the same as I did on Windows yet, but it's great enough to have made me leave Windows. The keyboard configuration alone (with the help of ydotool) makes it worth it.
Give it a try!
Ah, well that's your problem right there.
GNOME is shonky. If you know your way around the Windows keystrokes -- and everyone should -- then lots of Linux desktops honour them, or most of them and the rest can be added.
Xfce is a better desktop in pretty much every way. Smaller, faster, stabler, more customisable, more keyboard-controllable, more screen-space-efficient.
> Is the professional edition of Windows this bad?
This is the professional edition of Windows.
uh-huh, I knew there was a reason I had previously dismissed this, although I will give them a high five for 32GB of LPDDR4 even if it is soldered onto the MB
Which is the one you call "the reason"?
I guess put another way: who do they think the target audience is for a laptop with 32GB but with a stupid resolution like 1920x1200?
Are you misreading or misunderstanding?
"Full HD" is 1080P, usually pronounced "ten eighty pee".
Ten eight means one thousand and eighty.
One thousand two hundred is more than one thousand and eighty. It is one hundred and twenty more in fact.
I do not know of any 1280 line screens in vertical resolution. 1280x1024 used to be considered large and this is much bigger than that.
The X13s has a considerably higher than "full HD" screen by the normal definition of the term that I know.
It is an ultraslim ultralight ultraportable with no cooling fans and no air vents. That's why it's a thirteeen inch screen. It's still a lot bigger than an iPad or something. It's bigger than an iPad Pro.
Good for them making it "bigger than an iPad Pro" but I'm not shopping for an iPad, I'm shopping for a laptop that I can take on work trips that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out trying to use it
It is not only not less than HD, which you were complaining about, it's more than HD. It's not only not as bad as you were complaining, it is better than what you were complaining about.
And not only is it better, it's also not 16:9, which loads of people complain about, it's 16:10. That is better too.
Which is why I pointed it out.
No, I do not work for Lenovo. I work for the Register. I wrote the article that you are complaining about. I wrote the story, and I posted it here on HN.
Although I will say it's super weird to have you defending the screen size of a vendor's laptop in a technology forum, but, hey, I think such passion about technology is great. Maybe one day Lenovo will acquire such passion, too
I take your point, but the thing you were bitching about was based on you misreading something that you actually copied and pasted into your reply and still did not read correctly!
I put real effort, and a lot of time, into these stories, and then someone starts complaining at me because they misread it... and angrily defends their misreading?
I get that it's not the laptop for you, and that's fine and I take no exception to that at all. I didn't design the thing.
But, y'know, this comment still stings...?
I see no future for ARM powered laptops. They'll disappear before they reach any significant adoption.
Apple’s bet it’s future on ARM.
Edit:spelling and logical consistency
RISC-V is dog slow. The absolutely top-end RISC-V kit is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 was a decade ago, and the Pi3 was £25 and it had 4 cores, and it can run about 6-7 OSes natively. Not Linux distros, different OSes: Linux, all the BSDs, Plan 9, Inferno, RISC OS.
If you were to buy one of these things -- and I wrote the review and I am not recommending it, not at this price -- you would probably wear it out and resell it off and buy the next gen device, and wear that one out in turn -- before any RISC-V laptop with this kind of performance comes on the market at any price.
Don't kid yourself.
1. No mainstream current Linux distro runs on the machine yet.
2. The original plan was to review it as a Linux machine, but as someone who rarely uses Windows any more, I found the experience of running Windows on Arm to be interesting enough that there was enough to write a fairly long article on the experience of using it as a Windows machine for a Linux user.
So, the plan is that there will be a future article on what it's like to run FOSS OSes on this machine.
Incidentally, it runs WSL very well, and I have Arm Ubuntu under WSL on the machine. It's fine and very usable, and makes the problem of accidentally running x86 binaries on Windows simply go away.
However, saying that, quite a few normal Linux tools are not available in Arm versions. For instance, almost any proprietary Linux app won't have Arm versions available.
There are Debian and Ubuntu builds for it. Both have major gotchas. I am working on it.
OpenBSD supports it, with the usual caveats of OpenBSD, e.g. no Bluetooth whatsoever.