Full AMD Linux Laptop (Radeon 7600M XT GPU, Ryzen CPU): Tuxedo Sirius 16 Review
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The case was slightly bent from factory (did wobble a bit when on a table) I sent it in and the "fixed" it (they didn't).
I never was really happy with it and I was pretty expensive for what I could afford as a CS student (like 1100€).
All of these issues went away over time and it's been running very smoothly for the last 18 months or so. Everything just works, and battery life is quite good.
The feel of the keyboard unfortunately cannot be fixed, and the built-in microphone sounds terrible, but with all the other issues gone, and very little need for a built-in microphone, I'm more or less happy with it.
WSL just made it easier not having to depend on VMware or Virtual Box.
The other devices get bought with WebOS and Android, just work.
Linux has gotten a lot better and windows a lot worse in the fifteen years since 7 came out. I'm forced to use Windows 11 for work and I have many, many issues with it that just aren't present in Linux.
Even ChromeOS doesn't fully support GNU/Linux when running Crostini, https://chromeos.dev/en/linux/linux-on-chromeos-faq
But it’s light and capable.
Still I’ll likely get a MacBook and run Asahi for my home laptop as the build quality is still the best in the industry.
If you'd run Asahi anyways, seriously consider a Framework. You'll get much more for your money, and they have people on staff dedicated to providing a good Linux experience.
Which is related to the presence of a numberpad. Not that I care about a number pad, but I dislike it making everything to the side of the screen.
Unfortunately for them, I have a feeling my current Lenovo Ryzen is going to last me a good few years.
T14 3rd Gen, AMD Ryzen edition, 32Gb ram. It's significantly faster than my work MacBook Pro after they installed all the bullshit.
Not that people who like numpads shouldn’t also have the option, but it really should be an option. As a sibling comment notes, the Framework 16 does this but traditional laptops ought to do it too.
Larger laptops practically always have a numpad though. I think the last ~17” laptop I saw without one was the 17” MBP, which was discontinued over a decade ago.
A lot of mice are designed for the right hand only, so I got used to it.
It's more than 90% of people that this laptop will not work for.
- no tenkey - arrow keys not laid out in a T configuration
A close 3rd is trying to cram more than just ctrl/meta(window)/alt keys to the left of the spacebar.
preference is a hell of a drug :)
I found most TKLs have the arrow keys in the T formation, it's when you get to 65% that they start messing about with the layout.
For example:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drop-CTRL-High-Profile-Mechanical-K...
Framework was prototyping an ortho keyboard module but it never came to market.
- reasonably good (but aging) motherboard -- 10th gen intel, 64gb ddr4, pcie3 nvme.
- great 3000x2000 13" screen. i just put a matte screen protector (ordered custom cut to measure) and it's way better than many off-the-shelf matte screens
- fabulous keyboard. not mechanical but so much better than any chiclet.
- trackpoint. i've put in the touchpadless palm rest just for style points.
i really wish someone would produce a comparable 'actually new' laptop for when i'm upgrading, but the outlook isn't good.
Why don't you look into making that yourself, or finding other people who want that kind of touchpad and then contracting with someone/a company who could then make that?
It takes some prior research on dimensions, connectors and drivers. So many things could go wrong and I'm not sure I have the time and the knowledge to get started.
If I involve a company it's going to cost a lot of money.
If somebody kickstarters it I'll support the project.
It's an easy recommend for anyone in the market. I think they have higher spec'd versions, too, but imho the value proposition is really in the low/mid range.
I do hate the keyboard layout, but generally leave the laptop connected to an external kb as a part of the setup.
Hibernation is absolutely not there, one other loss vs the macbooks.
I don't know how well it will run linux (Pop to be specific) but I've got 3 other Minisforum AMD machines and they all run Pop great!
It would cost substantially more for a small-scale company to produce a laptop with the quality of MacBooks than it costs Apple. That cost difference would have to be passed to the consumer.
More compromises: lack of ports, missing basic functionality in OS, very high cost for ram and ssd.
Especially trackpads. Almost nobody makes good trackpads except Apple. I don't get why.
> The new Yoga Pro 7 is extremely quiet in daily use; the fans are usually not spinning when the laptop is running basic tasks. During gaming, you can expect around 36-42 dB(A) of noise from the device, though this depends on CPU utilisation. Noise levels only went as high as 36.2 dB(A) in our stress test and remained constant at that. The Yoga Pro 7 reached a much louder 47.3 dB(A) in High Performance mode, which we think is unnecessary. Our review unit didn't give off any other electronic noises.
> Our measurements indicate that the new AMD-based Yoga Pro 7 is highly efficient and uses a paltry 7.9 watts at idle with screen brightness turned all the way up and refresh rate set to 90Hz. There also aren't any issues under load: you can expect power usage to be around 60 watts during gaming.
> The Yoga Pro 7 had a really strong showing, lasting nearly 10 hours at 60Hz and 9 hours at 90Hz even at max brightness. When brightness was adjusted to 150 cd/m² (equivalent to 81% of max brightness on our review unit), the device even managed to hit 13 hours in the Wi-Fi test and 15 hours during video playback.
Those things were built like tanks back when IBM owned the brand. My intro to Unix as a kid was installing a mail ordered copy of Ubuntu onto one! Survived years of physical abuse and reinstalls, and still boots up fine almost 20 years later
Because hackintoshes are much, much, much less common than someone slapping Linux on some random bit of kit. And nobody complains about OSX breaking or not running perfectly on non-Apple hardware. As evidenced by the term "hackintosh" itself.
It's very hard for a Linux hardware company to gain any ability to innovate when so much of the market goes elsewhere.
IMHO, it's nigh on miraculous that System76 is as great as it is. I would dearly love for them to be able to do more, but the reality is that most folks complain that it's not exactly what they want, and/or not exactly at the price point they want, and give their money to someone else. (Then they complain that Linux doesn't support their new Windows hardware adequately!)
The smartest thing Apple ever did was force you to but Apple kit to run Apple software. Had they not, they'd have suffered the same fate. And we'd be discussing how much OSX sucks because it doesn't support the consumer Dell models adequately. (If OSX even continued to exist.)
Smart? Nah that was just the common practice at the rise of the Mac. IBM was somewhat insane for making such an open platform for anyone to play in. Yet, had they not done that we would not be having this discussion.
DEC, Amiga, Osborne, the Java machine, etc. all were basically just locked up ecosystems based on proprietary software not built for tinkering.
The amount of firmware has since exploded, and it's gotten much more complex to boot (pun intended.)
I think that's more the problem than specialized hardware.
That's gonna be interesting to see, one-size-fits-all laptop for Linux. Watching how disputes on THE TRUE AND THE ONLY EDITOR still ongoing, Vi/Vim/NeoVIM crowd vs EMACS adepts (VSCode users not to be considered as REAL GUYS of course, just frontend devs or even traitors of GNU), do you expect those crowds even can agree on should be there blobs/proprietary firmware, SecureBoot and TPM/Pluton used in such laptops? I seriously doubt.
Sorry, had to say it. Has the world really moved on from 16:9? I only buy used thinkpads and am t420 and t470s deep into the 16:9 era.
It might not seem like much but the additional vertical space make development easier.
The only time I'll accept something wider than 16:10 is an ultrawide external monitor that ends up functioning as two side by side monitors.
For primarly gaming or media consumption devices I'm still fine with 16:9.
In terms of quality, I find that the modularity of the laptop under the hood is amazing. I can tinker and change stuff with ease. Battery lasts ~9 hours while coding, browsing, watching videos, and video calls.
I will highly likely buy more for my company as needed.
I'm not that price sensitive personally, but I wish this thing had a trackpoint.
> did they send you the test unit for free? do you get to keep it? or did you go out to buy it so you are sure you did not get a selected unit?
Most of the review units for the dozens of different Linux laptops he reviews are temporary units he has to send back. Sometimes they are pre-production runs, sometimes regular consumer runs, etc. I believe he did buy a Tuxedo Slimbook a few years ago out of pocket separate from the products of theirs he has reviewed on the channel.
Nick is legit though. If there is a problem with a laptop he mentions it. If the laptop is nice but pretty high priced he mentions it. If it has failures because the people making it didn't actually "try to use it" he mentions that.
> Because if you can only afford these tests if the unit is provided to you, the channel would not exactly be fine without their support
There are a lot of ways it could be done. By no means do we need companies to send review units to YouTubers. They are doing this because THEY are competing to get their product seen. If they are stupid enough to stop interacting with the communities that build the worlds around their products we will (a) continue to look at products by companies that aren't that stupid and (b) crowdsource the products and information ourselves. I would be willing to get say a 30% discount on a laptop if Nick wants to get it shipped to him first for review.
Does llama.cpp work with Radeon? Wait.. maybe ollama and Stable Diffusion will actually work with ROCm now?
I still suspect I am going to be swimming upstream if I experiment with newer or less common models on Python ML scripts on non-Nvidia hardware.
https://github.com/l1na-forever/stable-diffusion-rocm-docker
You may have to do a few slight things to give the docker container access to your GPU. On Fedora Linux I have these packages installed related to ROCm:
$ dnf list --installed | grep -i rocm
rocm-smi.x86_64 5.7.1-1.fc39 @updates
And you'll see in the `Dockerfile` here the change that was mae was basically this:
FROM rocm/pytorch:latest
Let me know if you want any help.
EDIT - The last important bit of hidden information is you MAY need to set an environment variable based on which card you have. Some of the consumer cards are essentially the same as their data center cards, but they don't use the same internal names. For that reason you may have to have an environment variable like:
HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.4
The reason I asked is because there are other popular ways to use Stable Diffusion like stablediffusion.cpp, ComfyUI, running the raw Python scripts, and solutions built in Rust on candle.