
KDE Slimbook - bananaoomarang
http://kde.slimbook.es/
======
asciimo
Here's another source. [https://liliputing.com/2017/01/kde-slimbook-linux-
powered-la...](https://liliputing.com/2017/01/kde-slimbook-linux-powered-
laptop-780.html) the i7 upgrade with 16mb looks good, though I'd prefer better
screen resolution.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Linux isn't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took
quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop. My DE, Cinnamon, eventually
looked okay once I tweaked the scaling (worked about as well as GNOME), but I
still have to deal with a plethora of apps that are microscopic.

I don't use KDE, but I've been told Qt apps are supposed to scale better on
HiDPI.

~~~
reitanqild
_Linux isn 't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took
quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop. My DE, Cinnamon,

...

I don't use KDE, ..._

Or should we say that _Cinnamon on Fedora_ doesn't work _for you, on your
hardware_ instead of dismissing something that many of us prefer to any other
operating system, paid or free?

Edit: I'm a bit fed up with people writing like they can decide what is good
or not.

I have used Windows since 1995, Linux since at least 2003, Mac (full time for
both work and personal) for almost 3 years around 2010. FTR I was enthusiastic
about getting a Mac, paid more for software than I'd ever done before, got my
employer to pay for extra screen, keyboard, mouse and I think even an extra
trackpad. For me it was a huge disappointment and I suffered through the last
year after finally admitting it didn't work for me.

I have my opinions. I don't say you cannot prefer something else, but I will
not accept other peoples authority to decide which OS is best for me and
everyone else.

Edit2: as usual I don't mind the downvotes but I ask you to please tell me
what I did to deserve them.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Your defensiveness about your preferred OS blinds you to the point I'm trying
to make. There's a reason that there's an entire page on the ArchWiki
dedicated to tweaking for HiDPI:
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI)

The fact is, it's not uniformly supported yet across Linux distros. Qt apps
should theoretically be DPI-aware, but that's no guarantee either. See the
various bugs filed against VLC, for instance:
[https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17823](https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17823)

If your goal is to prove that it can be done, then I'm sure you'd be perfectly
happy with KDE or KaOS in order to prevent someone from downloading an app
that _might not_ be HiDPI compliant.

But for the average person, it might be more trouble than it's worth. Or they
might not like KDE. In which case, my recommendation that it might be better
to stick with 1080P for now still stands.

~~~
reitanqild
The problem IMO is you just say Linux isn't there yet.

You state it like a fact. You say it with no reservation about this being a
very high resolution display etc.

In my opinion it wouldn't be less serious if I said Mac and Windows aren't
really there yet because their package managers really doesn't compare to apt.
Note: I don't say this. (At least not anymore : )

~~~
stormbrew
For HiDPI screens? Linux really truly isn't there yet. I say this as someone
who has used almost entirely linux desktops and laptops for years, and not
exclusively for a long time before that, and who finds nearly everything about
a linux desktop better than the alternatives (yes, really).

But my HiDPI laptop brings me frequent pain that I wasn't anticipating and
it's not clear there's even a path forward to solving those problems in a
consistent way. It's a whack-a-mole problem.

~~~
lima
I got it working really well for me.

Please share your list of annoyances, I want to help :)

~~~
Jedd
Off the top of my head ...

Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale. Arduino
IDE is a good example - lots of bugs filed about it, some fixes ostensibly out
there, but I've spent hours with no success -- the UI is unreadably tiny on my
3yo 3200x1800 laptop.

You can tweak your desktop (I use KDE) and many (but not all) other
applications to scale up, but as soon as you plug in a monitor with different
characteristics (I frequently plug into a 22" 1600x1200 LCD) things are going
to look horrendous on at least one of your screens.

If you fix those two, I'll come up with some more. :)

~~~
flukus
> Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale.

Isn't that true on every platform?

~~~
throwaway91111
Well, except Mac OS. There are ways to "forget" about scaling and render in
pixel terms, but chances are your app already looks like shit if this applies
to you. The native UI toolkit renders to points which are scaled pixels.

Then there's image/graphic density; I can live with that.

~~~
MBCook
The only thing that can be a problem on OS X, and I do mean ONLY thing that
I've run into, is some games don't scale at all. So you'll open a game that
draws into its window (I recently experienced this with Shenzhen I/O) and
everything in the window is rendered like you had one to one pixel scaling. It
works perfectly, everything is really tiny.

If you put it in full screen the monitor gets adjusted and it's not an issue.

At the same time other games don't have the problem. For example I've been
playing Stardew Valley and it works perfectly fine in windowed mode looking
exactly the way you'd want it to.

But normal applications based on UIKit and not a GL surface or something else
like that? It's perfect.

------
rocky1138
This is great. The only trouble is that it's only got two USB ports and no
Ethernet. Secondarily, the USB ports are only 3.0 not 3.1.

Other than that, having a stable KDE Neon hardware platform is really exciting
to me. I run KDE Neon full-time on my Macbook Pro.

Any other KDE Neon fans out there?

~~~
cies
Yups. Neon is pretty solid at the moment, and just getting started. I run it
on an XPS13 and have had no issues yet (but did not try working with an
external monitor yet, which is known as sometimes giving issues)

------
dotancohen
Why does the KDE Slimbook have a Windows key?
[http://kde.slimbook.es/images/xheader.png.pagespeed.ic.WfFJL...](http://kde.slimbook.es/images/xheader.png.pagespeed.ic.WfFJLBvEwO.png)

Could they not get a Tux or even the KDE Gear icon printed on the keyboard?

~~~
dr_zoidberg
Because they sell Slimbooks with either Linux or Windows:
[https://slimbook.es/caracteristicas](https://slimbook.es/caracteristicas)

~~~
throwaway91111
Why not make it something brand less? They allow customizations by language;
it's not crazy to put thought into the keyboard at that point.

~~~
Snowe
"Meta" would be a good name.

~~~
majewsky
"Meta" usually refers to Alt on Linux systems with IBM-PC-derived keyboards.
When I look at `xmodmap -pm` on my system, the Windows key is referred to as
"Super".

~~~
throwaway91111
That's a rather arbitrary binding; some keyboards have a discrete meta key. No
reason to use super if you're not targeting windows!

~~~
zumu
Alt had already been used to replace meta by the time the windows key came
about. Therefore they mapped the windows key to super.

You can blame Emacs users.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_\(keyboard_button\))

------
brudgers
KDE announcement: [https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-
lapt...](https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-laptop-kde-
fans)

Slimbook site seems to have collapsed under the internet's hug.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
The announcement gives a more understandable purpose to the laptop, namely:
get the KDE developers and enthusiasts onto a uniform piece of hardware.

It's much easier to do Apple-levels of QA when you have Apple-level hardware
control.

------
AdmiralAsshat
[https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-kde/kde-
intel-i7-compr...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-kde/kde-
intel-i7-comprar)

Feel like for the price, you could get a comparable laptop that's a hair
lighter and just throw KDE onto it. The only thing I see on there that makes
it inherently more FOSS-friendly is the inclusion of an Intel wifi card, that
has a kernel-supported driver in Linux.

I'm also not too keen on the bezel size. I guess I've been spoiled by my XPS
13.

~~~
cies
I have an XPS13 with an Intel wifi card; still has the occasional issues (wifi
not picking up networks after waking up from suspend). I'd say it happens to
me on average once every one or two months, seemingly at random.

~~~
snuxoll
For as well-supported Intel wireless NIC's are, I've found they are utter
garbage. The Intel 7260 in my work-issued W540 randomly flakes out on me and
has giant latency spikes, I actually ended up saying to hell with the one in
my personal XPS 13 and swapped it with a Broadcom card that's worked much
better.

~~~
cies
Good to know. I kind of assumed they'd be like Intel graphics: most open among
its competition.

~~~
snuxoll
You're not wrong, which is why I said they are well-supported. But that
doesn't mean anything when the hardware itself is awful, I have the same
issues regardless of whether I'm using Linux or Windows.

I may need a proprietary kernel module for my Broadcom NIC, but the damned
thing actually works consistently.

------
johnnycarcin
I was super excited about this until I saw it was another 13" screen. Does
anyone enjoy using a screen that small (honest question)? To me anything under
15" just doesn't make sense, especially if 50% of my time is spent without an
external monitor.

~~~
ajdlinux
15" is way too big to actually be portable. My work machine is 15" and I find
it almost unusable away from my desk. 13" is just perfect.

Of course, at my desk, I have an external monitor...

~~~
NTripleOne
Personally I don't see how people could even stand using a laptop smaller than
15", but maybe that's just because every laptop I've ever owned has been 15".

...that said, I do own a 10" tabtop, and that's... good for web browsing I
guess, wouldn't dream of coding on it.

------
gravypod
Website isn't loading for me but seems to be cached.

Text only:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kde.sli...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kde.slimbook.es&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

Full cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Akde.s...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Akde.slimbook.es&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

------
ris
Not again. I do wish the KDE project would stop getting distracted by quixotic
hardware and/or mobile projects and concentrate on building a killer desktop.
I hate to say it but parts of KDE today do feel _worse_ than what we had ten
years ago e.g. kmail2/akonadi which causes me pain on a daily basis.

~~~
dguaraglia
I don't mean to diss the KDE project, but my experience with KDE, ever since
around 2. _, has been that it feels optimized for screenshots: Everything
looks_ gorgeous* out of the box, but when you start actually using the
destkop, a lot of things feel clunky, cluttered, buggy or they just don't make
sense in the current world (Plasma, I'm looking at you.) I also can't
understate the "buggy" part. I've never experienced as many crashes as when
using applications in the KDE suite of utilities.

~~~
flukus
It seems like KDE has always been too broadly focused instead of just trying
to be a kickass desktop. Things like KOffice just seem to be unneccesary
replication of effort to get prettier qt widgets.

10 years ago I KDE groupie, but on my latest install of gone with gnome and
found the default themes (especially dark mode) to be much better. Also the
fonts, I'm a programmer that wouldn't normally notice the difference between a
serif and san-serif font, but whatever the gnome guys are doing looks
absolutely gorgeous.

~~~
jpetso
There are a number of people who thought that having a KDE office suite was a
good idea, they worked on it, KDE gladly welcomed them into the project and
provided infrastructure & announcements.

Those same people might have not worked on the bits that you value yourself
even if they were forced off of KOffice (now Calligra). They likely
contributed a number of bugfixes and expanded use cases for KDE libraries
along the way.

KDE still has a well-defined desktop environment project, you just can't force
people into it that have a different agenda to begin with.

------
DeepYogurt
There seems to be no mention of firmware on the site. Can someone in the know
comment on if coreboot is supported?

------
Roritharr
Please give me a 32GB Ram option.

If not possible, please tell me why. :(

~~~
RazrFalcon
Can you explain your use-case?

PS: 8GB user

~~~
jlarocco
I have 16 Gb in the MBP I use for photo editing, and more memory would be
really nice. I'll sometimes have Capture One, DxO Optics, and PixelMator open
at the same time, and I notice a performance impact versus only having one of
them open. They don't die outright, but performance suffers when there's not
enough memory to hold many preview and thumbnail images in memory.

I have Linux running on an old iMac, also with 16 Gb, and I've hit the
boundary there a few times, too, but usually only when I'm playing with 3D
graphic rendering.

More memory never hurts, and often speeds things up.

There's also the psychological aspect that if I'm buying a new machine I want
it to be bigger and better than the ones I already have.

------
hysan
While this sounds interesting, unless there is:

\- a user friendly support/bug reporting channel

\- some sort of promise that actual found bugs will be resolved with a higher
priority

\- sane configurations + nice themes out of the box

Unless all of those are offered, I don't see any draw to buying this. The way
I see it, this is something only early adopters would get. There's no
guarantee that things will work smoothly out of the box. If I'm going to be
paying for a KDE branded device, then I'd need to be convinced that the
experience would be better than buying a nice, "Linux compatible" (per
reviews, whatever) notebook and just installing Neon on it myself. This is
what Apple and Microsoft (with their Surface line) do and while neither are
perfect, everyone I know __feels __safer buying those brands. And in the end,
that 's the biggest driving force in decision making for normal consumers.

------
Splendor
Very nice. I would buy this over a MacBook Air assuming two things:

* The trackpad isn't terrible

* The battery life is decent (6+ hours)

------
olympus
This looks remarkably similar to the HP Envy that I bought in 2015:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015AD1ZFA/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015AD1ZFA/)
The HP has a slightly different port arrangement on the sides and a higher
resolution screen.

I'm sure the cost supports the KDE project, but you could buy the HP, install
Linux yourself (if you're buying one of these you are probably capable of
installing your own OS), and donate $50 to the KDE project and come out
ahead-- assuming you live in the USA and can get the old Envy for $715.

~~~
distances
The big benefit of Slimbook would be the tested hardware "where any potential
hardware-related issues have already been ironed out before a new version of
our software is shipped to them", according to the KDE announcement:
[https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-
lapt...](https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-laptop-kde-
fans)

------
RazrFalcon
>CD-ROM/DVD - Not available

>Package Contents - 1 x drivers disk

Why?!

------
aphextron
I see an overpriced Chinese ultra-book with a weird laser etched logo. I was
mildly interested until seeing the price point. 4GB ram and a dual core i5 for
$800 is crazy in 2017.

Not sure who they're expecting to buy this.

------
tormeh
I would be a lot more interested in a laptop from Red Hat or Canonical.

------
veli_joza
My Asus UX303 looks almost identical to this (the only difference I could find
is small bevel underneath touchpad). Is UX303 then also a rebrand of some
generic model?

My current experience is that it's great linux laptop even though it's not
supported (comes with Windows). It's fast and snappy, very light, robust and
nice to use. Keyboard is bad, touchpad is meh. Screen is very sharp and
comfortable. Speakers are surprisingly useful.

------
pbnjay
Is there anything like this with 3x3 MIMO wifi and a hi-dpi screen? my 13"
macbook pro is great but not sure if I could go backwards on those 2 points
right now.

------
shmerl
KDE is great, though it feels like things take a long time to implement (such
as move to Wayland).

~~~
distances
KDE has the extra layer of Qt in between. That brings a load of benefits
thanks to an array of paid professional hands developing the toolkit, but the
downside of course is that some of the issues just have to be fixed on the Qt
level.

For example, it took a while before the multi-screen support in Qt 5 was
mature enough to provide a stable foundation for a desktop environment. I'm
sure KDE could solve these problems somehow in-house too, but the fact is that
development power is limited so it makes all the sense to solve the issues in
the correct layer in the first place.

~~~
shmerl
Yeah, multiscreen was a complete mess until very recently. Not just because of
Qt, but because of several Plasma bugs. It's much better now.

------
tedmiston
Just curious if anyone considering this has compared it to the Chromebook
Pixel 2015 model. The Pixel is discontinued now but still available (and for
half of its retail price). It seems like the two machines target a similar
audience.

------
vermaden
No go. Shitty keyboard. Learn from Thinkpad T400 how good keyboard looks like.

------
jasonkostempski
Are there Linux users out there that would actually use a pre-installed OS?

~~~
nkantar
Probably not (many), but I'd wager a thing like this is largely aimed at
current non-Linux users anyway.

Alternately, Linux by default could be seen as a sign that hardware is
reasonably well supported, so rolling one's own may be less effort than
otherwise.

~~~
distances
The KDE announcement does promise that hardware issues for this device are
sorted out before pushing out updates.

------
cJ0th
The picture provided isn't big enough to be 100% sure but as far as I can tell
the super key features the windows logo...

~~~
tsdgeos
According to OMG Ubuntu [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/slimbo...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/slimbook-tux-key-1-750x610.jpeg)

------
nmca
This looks great; may well be my next laptop.

------
qplex
I had now clue "KDE Neon" was an operating system.

~~~
jpetso
It's made by the same people that ran Kubuntu before they got disappointed in
some of Canonical's decisions and decision-making process, so now they have
their own OS that works closer with KDE upstream.

------
cies
slimbook.es is down, anyone has the pricing info?

~~~
distances
729€ for i5 and 849€ for i7.

~~~
sabaton
... and specs? ram, screen res, battery claims ... I'm potentially interested!

~~~
optimog
Found the specs on the OMGubuntu website (1):

KDE Slimbook i5

Intel i5-6200U @ 2.3GHz Intel Graphics HD 520 4GB, 8GB or 16GB RAM 120GB SSD
(upgradeable) Priced from €729 Full HD 13"

KDE Slimbook i7

Intel i7-6500U @ 2.5GHz Intel Graphics HD 520 4GB, 8GB or 16GB RAM 120GB SSD
(upgradeable) Priced from €849 Full HD 13"

1: [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/01/kde-slimbook-laptop-
specs...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/01/kde-slimbook-laptop-specs-price)

------
ramenmeal
Looks identical to a macbook air, down to the screws.

------
euyyn
I wonder why they used a Spanish TLD.

~~~
mentat2737
Because it's a Spanish company.

------
brilliantcode
> 729,00 € = $1021 CAD!

There's just no way this is going to compete with Chromebook which you can
install Ubuntu as well or buying any slightly older laptops and installing
ubuntu.

what is the minimum cost of such "slim" devices? I'm optimistic that
Chromebook will come down in prices and armed with built in cellular
connectivity with ARM processor for that all day battery life is the ultimate
dev tool.

I enjoy using last year's macbook but I equally enjoyed using Ubuntu on my
older laptop for development purposes.

