
New KDE Slimbook launched with Ryzan-4000 series processor - jlpcsl
https://www.neowin.net/news/new-kde-slimbook-launched-with-ryzan-4000-series-processor
======
spuz
Probably worth mentioning that they also do a non KDE version of these two
laptops without the KDE branding on the lid and with your choice of a number
of different Linux distros (or windows) pre-installed.

Here is the 14" model: [https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-
x-i7-1-compr...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-
x-i7-1-comprar)

and 15" model: [https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x-15/pro-
x-i7-2-co...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x-15/pro-
x-i7-2-comprar)

~~~
Tsiklon
of note those machines are machines with Intel Processors in the same chassis,
and are not AMD powered.

~~~
spuz
Yeah sorry - they messed up the links for the AMD and Intel versions of the
laptop. The links that I gave originally linked to the AMD versions (even
though they have i7 in the URL). The new correct URLs are:

[https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-x-amd-
compra...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-x-amd-comprar)

[https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-
pro-x-15/pro-x-15-amd-...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-
pro-x-15/pro-x-15-amd-comprar)

~~~
Tsiklon
No sorry, my bad too - I missed those options altogether when I was looking at
the website.

------
tomp
Wow, this laptop is serious business, it's the only less-than-15-inch laptop I
could find with 32GB of RAM below 1500 EUR (it's only 1069!). Does anyone have
any experience with these ones, any reviews?

~~~
baybal2
The thing is, a lion share of all AMD notebooks on the market is developed,
and manufactured by a single OEM.

If you look inside recent lenovos, or huawei laptops: scratch, scratch, and
you see Qinghua Tongfang logos on PCB, and body parts. The PCB design, and
parts list is nearly identical.

Very few big brand companies have in-house engineering for laptops, and the
few who have, have it for Intel only.

~~~
0xfaded
This is really cool information.

My current laptop is a €3.000 Lenovo X1, which I'm not particularly impressed
by.

I was impressed by my 440s which lasted 5 years though.

Where would you suggest I go for my next laptop?

~~~
baybal2
X1 has a 15w ULP CPU. Is it the performance that doesn't satisfy you? If so,
the 45W Ryzen should indeed blow it out of water.

I cannot find any new machine on the market with the OLED screen X1 has
though.

~~~
0xfaded
Sorry, it's an X1 extreme with a i7-9850H, also 45W. Compute capability wise,
I'm quite happy.

I've been disappointed with build quality compared to the older 440s. The
nvidia prime setup with a shared frame buffer also makes the external display
ports more or less useless under linux.

I feel like I've paid a high lenovo premium for a more-or-less average
notebook. If all branded laptops are using the same platform, I'm wondering if
there's a way to avoid paying that premium.

~~~
baybal2
Well, I myself have not seen any notebook as of late that satisfies my
standards on build quality too.

I myself long time dreamed to build my own, fully custom, factory quality
notebook, and possibly spin a small business around that.

Dell XPS has set a new high in laptop quality after a decade of boring,
rebranded OEM designs, and Taiwanese cookie cutter engineering, but it is
still not reaching the level of Japanese notebook brands before 2008.

I could've vouched for Panasonic, but they don't have 45W models. And despite
their still excellent quality, they are not aiming at the power user
demographics, like programmers.

------
nvarsj
These Ryzen chips look like game changers for laptops. Intel has stagnated for
so long in comparison. Preliminary reports show near desktop performance for
the Ryzen chips, and they blow Intel mobile chips out of the water - like 200%
faster and much better thermals for sustained computing. On the downside, I've
read rumors that Intel is leveraging its OEM relationships to keep AMD
processors out of top of the line models such as Thinkpad X1. Intel is also
preventing AMD laptops from using TB3. So it seems the options for an AMD
laptop right now will remain limited - but I hope this will improve over the
next year or so as demand increases for the cheaper and faster AMD laptops.
You should not be buying an Intel laptop anymore IMO.

~~~
pjmlp
Meanwhile I would be happy if my AMD GPU was able to support OpenGL 4.1 like
it used to do with fxglr, instead I have to be happy that it does OpenGL 3.1
at all with Mesa 20, or reboot into Windows to enjoy DirectX 11.

~~~
MrRadar
Which GPU do you have? According to
[https://mesamatrix.net](https://mesamatrix.net) the radeonsi driver for GCN
and RDNA cards supports OpenGL 4.6 (the latest), and the r600 driver for older
TeraScale cards supports 4.5.

~~~
pjmlp
Which given my hint about FXGLR doesn't do me much good.

[https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-
hd-6310-igp.c22...](https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-
hd-6310-igp.c2286)

With fxglr, I enjoyed OpenGL 4.1, hardware video decoding, even though as you
see from the specs, it can do more than that on Windows.

With the wonderful open source driver, I get OpenGL 3.1 without hardware video
acceleration.

~~~
ihattendorf
Do you mean fglrx?

Regardless, the problem is nobody wants to spend development time supporting
10+ year old cards when there isn't enough time to support all the features on
newer cards.

~~~
pjmlp
Indeed, which proves the point that having FOSS drivers is just publicity if
there isn't anyone willing to do the job.

My laptop works perfectly fine, so the consequence is me switching to Windows,
where Asus still keeps its DirectX 11 drivers for the laptop up to date for
Windows 10, although the laptop was bought during Windows 7 days.

~~~
ihattendorf
Or that whoever manufactured the device didn't care about
supplying/maintaining drivers for Linux so the community is left maintaining
them. There's nothing stopping the device manufacturer from spending the time
to support the device like they do on Windows, they just don't think it's
worth it due to the smaller market share (which makes sense from a business
perspective).

------
throwaway72220
I have never heard of Slimbook and most of what I can find on Google is in
Spanish. Are they any good? Do they design the laptops or are they rebranded
like System76's Clevo made laptops?

~~~
tabasko
Someone at Phoronix[1] forums suspected it to be made by TongFang. Seems to be
same laptop which Tuxedo[3] is also selling.

[1] [https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-
phoron...](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-
articles/1195427-tuxedo-computers-launches-a-linux-laptop-with-
ryzen-7-4800h-ryzen-5-4600h/page2) [2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/hunyv6/my_mechr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/hunyv6/my_mechrevo_code01_tongfang_pf5nu1g_review/)
[3] [https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-
Note...](https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-
Notebooks/15-16-inch/TUXEDO-Book-Pulse-15-Gen1.tuxedo#!#h4-configurator)

~~~
solidninja
Also sold as the Schenker Via 15 Pro [1]. Wonder if it will also come with a
4K OLED display option (Tuxedo will also offer one on the configurator within
a week).

[1] [https://bestware.com/en/schenker-
via-15-pro.html](https://bestware.com/en/schenker-via-15-pro.html)

------
lvturner
Unfortunately cloudflare has blocked my access to
[https://kde.slimbook.es/](https://kde.slimbook.es/) :(

~~~
ddorian43
We're sorry, 50% of the internet is not available to you.

1\. Please try again later.

2\. Please solve 10 captchas to train our machine learning stuff so you can
access it.

3\. Please use our Google (TM) login to get tracked on every breath you take.
We have to see you are breathing because robots don't breathe.

4, Please volunteer to your ISP to find the other customers with hacked
computers that are sending spam with the ip that was rotated to you, and clean
their pc.

~~~
missosoup
This is too real.

Especially captcha hell with absolutely no way out if you get rotated a 'bad'
IP.

~~~
oDahjie0
This is a systematic problem when you use tor.

I would really like a journalist to investigate this, by the way. The goal of
a captcha is to prove you're human. What is the goal of 10 captcha in a row?

I can make two hypothesis:

1\. it's meant to discourage humans from using privacy preserving tools like
tor, so it would be basically an agressive action to prevent them to access
the content and force them to abandon their privacy tools

2\. it could be a mean to identify the user by doing behavioral
fingerprinting, by checking their movement speed, time of pattern recognition,
etc, based on multiple inputs.

I can't think of a case where such practice is not malicious and would not
require scrutiny.

------
rcarmo
I’ve been looking at Lenovo and Asus/Acer equivalents of this and must say
that this crop of Ryzen chips seems to be very decent.

However, most of the interesting models seem to be unavailable outside the US,
as most brands dump older hardware revisions as “back to school” gear in
Europe.

So this might be an alternative if you want a 48XX now...

~~~
fk6aaa545c
Yeah I've been on t495 for almost a year and, it's a blasphemy I know, but i'm
happy I upgraded from t420.

And I know people with intel-based thinkpads (both linux and windows)
complaining about horrible performance because intel power management.

Hopefully the trend will continue I used to put intel everywhere but today I
have no problems with AMD (especially on linux).

That said my t495 came faulty from factory (trackpoints button not working
properly) the quality issues are well documented if you search for that (iirc
toms hardware chief editor wrote about that as well) but they changed it for
me for free and upgraded to ryzen7 for free as well, that's a fair deal I
would say.

------
lorenzhs
Looks rather nice, but "up to 5 hours battery with real use" for the 14" model
is pretty awful, to put it mildly. They should get a lot more running time
from a 47Wh battery than 5h. Only one USB-C port (apparently without charging
support?) is pretty stingy, too. And one of the USB-A ports is only USB 2.0?
WTF

~~~
baybal2
I would rather be glad them being so honest.

We have a laptops with even smaller batteries from major brands who claim 10+
hours battery life.

13 inch LG Gram used to have a microscopic battery, while they claimed 16
hours of life from it. They got into quagmire with press coverage, and nearly
doubled the battery size in the next generation.

Half of battery life on a modern laptop is basically battery size/screen size,
and you can't do anything about it except adding a bigger battery.

It's still possible to make a laptop with terrible battery life if you get a
single "power hog" part.

For an Intel system, a CPU, and its VRM may take less than 1W in idle, but a
bad WiFi card, DP-LVDS bridge, USB hub, Thunderbolt chip, SSD, or terrible
power supply can easily blow the power budget above 6-9W in idle.

Even seemingly innocuous parts like SD card readers, keyboard/touchpad
controllers, sensors, wacom chips, embedded controllers can be very bad at
idle power consumption, to the extent they take more power than idling CPU.

~~~
lorenzhs
Sure, some manufacturers claim outrageous battery life numbers that noone has
ever managed to achieve outside of a lab. But my 2017 X1 Carbon with a 57Wh
battery does manage close to 10 hours of actual light-ish use (with Linux).
Macbooks' running times are apparently pretty close to what Apple claims, too.
But 5 hours advertised running time is just bad, even if it actually manages
that much.

~~~
toyg
_> 0 hours of actual light-ish use (with Linux)_

There is Linux and there is Linux. Do you run KDE? It's basically the heaviest
DE around, so it's bound to impact power-management.

~~~
dTal
I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome 3 is heavier these days, and Plasma
even beats XFCE on some metrics. It's actually quite easy on the battery.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-
prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown-
in-2020/#3d02f90626d2)

~~~
pantaloony
This is obvious running on weak hardware or constrained VMs. Modern Gnome is
nearly unusable, while KDE is fine down to fairly low specs, especially if you
dial down the animations.

~~~
chupasaurus
It was like this on Plasma 4 after it had stabilized also.

------
72deluxe
Looks very nice, perhaps the replacement for my MacBook when it finally dies.

------
fomine3
No one pointed out: Ryzan!

------
the_dripper
This is pretty cool. Are there any other laptops with linux on them out there
?

~~~
mariusor
That's a pretty easy search to do I think.

Slimbook and Tuxedo Computers are selling similar rebranded models in the
European market, and Purism and System76 in the US.

From the major brand names, Lenovo is supposed to have preinstalled linux as
an option for their T line, and there's Dell also that sells the XPS Developer
edition.

