TUXEDO on ARM is coming: As you may have gathered from the relevant press over the last few days, we at TUXEDO Computers are working on an ARM notebook with a Snapdragon X Elite SoC from Qualcomm. The tension rises We know that many of you are eagerly ...
I really wonder if they got any better, I had such a bad time with my tuxodo computer, had to send it for repair twice and replaced it with a used ThinkPad after less than a year.
I've mostly been very satisfied with my InfinityBook 14 Gen7 that I got about 1.5 years ago. There have been some hardware issues (something wrong with the audio subboard that causes the sound from the speakers to go out once in a while, but they sent a new one that I haven't installed yet...). The mic is also not very good (some background noise), and the speakers when they work (which is most of the time) are also quite weak. I decided to spec it out as much as possible, and it does get hot under high loads, like gaming. The case is sleek, but perhaps a little flimsy?
But mostly it works perfectly fine, and it is such a great upgrade over my old MacBook that I finally get to do stuff on my computer now, and run into very few limitations (running newer games and other GPU-intensive tasks requiring more than 4 GB VRAM are the only things). Not to mention that I've had very good experience with their customer service when I n00b out and can't troubleshoot my way back.
Without UEFI, the boot process is different for each device, requires a custom boot loader, or at least explicit support by the operating system. Is your laptop going to be supported by the distribution you want to use? What about in 5 or 10 years? With UEFI, the boot process is standardized, so it should just work.
It is bearable but feature complete.
Every month linaro and the community add functionality.
The most recent things include a custom power-domain mapper implementation and apparently camera support.
If you are running wayland you can simply install any os and its working oob.
The laptops weight and heat production is awesome. Very practical.
Also the body is exceptional sturdy and worth mentioning (even in comparsion to a T14, e.g.).
But:
external monitors are not detected at boot
no hibernation
battery time is very depended on the task. It ranges from 4 to 13 hours.
no virtualization support, so one is stuck with tiny code generator runtime when using kvm
audio is pretty quiet, so depending on the environment an external source is required.
I followed almost all patches on the lkml.
It appears to me that the upcoming chip can benefit from the sc8280xp hugely.
It sufficies for my use cases but I promised myself a little better, yet.
I like silent laptops but sometimes I want to max out the power budget and get work done without worrying about thermal throttling. Having a fan and customizable power settings gives users a choice. Apple takes that choice away.
When I got my first Raspberry Pi (4B), I was kind of shocked at how hot even my passive Argon case would get. Though I am guessing a more powerful and efficient ARM or RISC-V CPU would not spike to 100% so fast. But when I got my Pi 5 I made sure to get the official case that came with a fan while I waited for the more powerful active cooling fan to release. So much better at running stuff like YouTube or other media without hitting thermal issues (got the active cooling Argon One for my 4B with similar results too).
Having more powerful ARM/RISC-V CPUs that can actually handle stuff I expect a full on laptop or especially a desktop will be awesome. But while we are in the "still not as good" period of these CPUs both matching x86_64 and programs for them being full versions. The inefficiencies of either needing emulation or just very un-optimized code as devs are getting the hang of ARM/RISC-V coming from x86 mean those temps are easy to hit.
Installing a fan negatively impacts the passive cooling ability (at the absolute least by taking space that could be occupied by a bigger radiator and by obstructing the airflow), so it's always a tradeoff.
Apple wanted to make it passively cooled, and it wouldn't be possible at decent loads if a fan would be installed alongside passive cooler.
Not necessarily. I own a passively cooled x86 laptop that runs just fine without throttling - granted, it's based on Celeron series CPU, but when we talk of ARM laptops, we normally don't talk powerful machines - Macs are rather an exception.