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StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop (starlabs.systems)
505 points by hedora on Feb 12, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 372 comments



This Linux laptop looks too good to be true.

It's available with an AMD or Intel processor, there aren't any strange ergonomic decisions (other than the stow-able web-cam). In particular, they centered they trackpad + keyboard, and it looks like it has decent thermals. The battery is rated for 18 hours. You can choose between a medium resolution, high frame rate display (UHD @ 165Hz) or a 4K 60Hz display. The screen is matte. They claim it POSTs in under a second.

The only real downside is the 4-5 month lead time. Am I missing something?


> Am I missing something?

Yeah. The company is three people with practically no money at hand. I can't imagine this being real. Check "full accounts made up to 28 February 2022" https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... with cash at hand being just 13,887 pounds. How on earth are you making a laptop from that? Framework started with a nine million seed round and had the former head of hardware at Oculus as the founder for expertise in this field. Now, almost eight figures is prolly overkill but I have hard time imagining low five figures being enough. It doesn't mean there's malicious intent here, they just might not be fully aware of the challenges here and will find themselves in way over their head.

Note there's no doxxing here, the CRN is on the contact us page: https://starlabs.systems/pages/contact-us


They seem to be real entrepreneurs running the thing from a farm in rural settings [1] where the director lives (same personal address declared). If I read it right they are in ca. 400k debt so far, working it down slowly. I am wishing them quick success as their product looks great. Perhaps if I will be patient enough waiting 5 month for delivery after payment and will not worry about if warranty (or even shipment) could be ever fulfilled by a tiny new company I will make a try myself. On paper this is a quality laptop that is so hard to find in the sea of trash. But perhaps will wait until more experiences are gained by other customers in a year or so (considering the half year delivery lag). I also wish they used less pompous text in the very first two senences of the headline in the style of hustlers with more mouth than content: "exquisitely crafted", "sets a new standard", "groundbreaking technology", "ultimate choice", "users who demand the very best". It is off-putting for me. No need to sugar the honey this hard.

I genuinely root for them.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Star+Labs+Systems/@51.1863...


That’s impressive, they are really bootstrap. The quality of their hardware and their support has been fantastic I highly recommend them if you can afford the weight


It is very promising they are having such good customer feedback.


Frankly, if it's three people, you're lucky it's not riddled with typos and grammatical errors. If "we aren't polished at PR" is your big criticism, it's a nit.

If they are successful, they'll eventually hire someone and likely get some polish on those details.


I think this criticism is missing the point of the OP. It’s not simply “PR”, it’s how the company views or thinks about their products that matters. It’s disingenuous at best to make such claims with presumably almost no laptops shipped, fraudulent at worst.


I'm a freelance writer and blogger. I see it as a noob mistake sometimes made by sincere, well-meaning but naive folks who don't know anything about PR.

It's, yes, potentially also fraudulent if they don't remotely live up to the claims. In a world of "fake it til you make it" where most small shops have little hope of competing with people with VC money, it's counterintuitive for most people that click bait style PR can come back to bite you.

/2 cents


I wish them good luck, I just wish as you pointed out with the hyperbolic statements they weren’t trying to poorly emulate Apple marketing. I found the page very harsh graphically and full of elementary design mistakes (font ratios, spacing, layout, etc), and not great copy writing. I know people feel the need to maximize their product marketing, but if you’re going to swing this hard, hire someone who is good enough to do it for you.


“Sugar the honey” is a great turn of phrase and new to me. Thank you!


See also “gild the lily”.


From https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/about-us

>In 2017, we started using Clevo as a supplier. The result was; the Star Lite Mk I, the Star LabTop Mk II and the Star LabTop Pro Mk I. There were a vast array of options to chose from in these laptops, from wireless to memory to pre-installed distribution. You may be familiar with Clevo as they have a lot of resellers across the world. It was a step in the right direction but they left something to be desired when comparing them to the competition - the batteries were small, the bezels were big and modern standards such as USB-C charging were not available.

>We had to build our own. When 2018 came around, we started working on our very own laptops. We used a variety of suppliers, design houses and factories. It was 6 long months of tooling and testing on repeat until two new laptops were born in December 2018; the Star Lite Mk II and the Star LabTop Mk III.

Simply put, they have the same business model as any other small brand for laptops, and that business model does not involve owning your own factories. Now, their small size and limited financial resources certainly casts doubt on their ability to provide ongoing support for their products, but it doesn't preclude getting a product out the door in the first place.


Wait so they design it in house? That's pretty amazing considering their small size, especially compared to system76.


They’re brought up on every “alternative to the Mac” thread as a brand that’s explicitly not a Clevo reseller but they somehow never get much attention.


> that business model does not involve owning your own factories

Apple does not own their own factories.


Apple’s manufacturing story is complex. They design most of the parts, and they often own the much of the equipment in the factories. Apple’s involvement with their suppliers is much much deeper than companies who resell ODM equipment.


Do they? I was under the impression most small brands simply resell such ODMs as Clevo or TongFang perhaps they add RAM/SSD/such -- but they do not design custom motherboards and chassis.


They did exactly that already for a few years. It doesn't seem crazy to me that after a while of that, they advanced to do a bit more. Still sounds like they mostly employed others, just now a level up from before, employing designers rather than buying finished product.


I have one of their machines (a StarBook that I am typing this on), and it is excellent. It probably helps to have a $9m seed round -- certainly it means Framework can do much more marketing (including such as the Steam Deck stunt) and hire more people -- and I'm sure it's easier to raise those funds from the US, but it is clearly not necessary. I hope that Star Labs does well enough that they are able to expand, raise funding if they wish, and compete with better capitalized companies.


- "Note there's no doxxing here,"

How on Earth could a customer looking up a vendor's business information be construed doxxing? Do you guys -- I'm asking sincerely, I'm feeling extraordinarily confused and out-of-touch -- think there's some of genuine privacy interest here that you'd wish to respect? Some sort of "right to anonymous business", where you can hide all your sketchiness behind a shell company and people need to *morally* respect your wishes?

Because, if I heard someone "doxxed" a company's ownership and financial documents non-consensually, all I'd have to say to them is "good on you, Wall Street Journal".


Having disgruntled customers show up at your office is not the same as them showing up at your home. It's not at all sketchy to want some privacy before you've gotten your office lease sorted. When starting a business you have all these circular dependencies, where you can't get a lease before you register your business, but when you register your business you need an address on day 1.


There is actually a solution to this in the UK. Directors are permitted to have a service address on the public record instead of their home address, and you can find a bunch of companies willing to allow you to rent one and forward mail.

You still need to provide your home address to companies' house but it isn't available to the public at large as easily.

This is not just possible it is an extremely good idea. Mobile phone companies in the UK are very lax about opening contracts (UK has an aversion to government identity cards, so defaults to "give us a utility bill" like you can't find templates online) and using a valid name/address combination is what scammers love to do. So if you want to avoid getting "welcome to" letters from every mobile provider in the UK 3x over (and your credit rating subsequently trashed) then using a service address is a great idea.


> How on Earth could a customer looking up a vendor's business information be construed doxxing?

I think "doxxing" has in some cases evolved from a sometimes-necessary norm in pseudonymous forums to a context-free knee-jerk reaction to somebody's details being out there.

I appreciate the norm when it allows people to safely be themselves among pseudonymous peers. Yes, by all means let's keep each other feeling safe. But like you, when somebody is doing business with the public, I think we should expect to know who they are. It seems insane to me that MrSquanchy69 can take in gobs of money, execute a rugpull, and have people saying, "bUt WhAt aBOuT tHeIr PriVAcY?!?" Public impact and public accountability go hand in hand.


> But like you, when somebody is doing business with the public, I think we should expect to know who they are.

If you want public accountability, then start with the legislators.

I'll give you an example, the state claims to have the publics interest at heart, especially kids, so why dont they teach law to kids at school?

You cant assume parents have the best interests of their kids at heart. Some state employees will abuse their own kids in order to further the science that wouldn't have got past a University's ethics board!

Where is the public holding the state to account, when it hides behind its own legislated secrecy?

So when you say "by all means let's keep each other feeling safe" do you really mean that or are just satisfying some subconscious desire to divide people?

Lots of businesses run out of disused farm buildings, its cheap space.

Google started from a garage in someone's home. Many businesses run from people's spare bedroom.

What purpose is the doxxing serving other than drawing attention to a location?

Google used to do way more doxxing of people in the early days, like displaying content behind password protected forums on people.

Dont see Google getting called out about that do we?


What?

I mean yes, you talk about some good things. Legislators should be more accountable. I'm already on record as advocating not only for the existing financial transparency at the federal level, but that elected officials should have every financial transaction be part of a public record while they're in office and for years after. Because sunlight is the best disinfectant.

For the same reason, people taking money from the public should be on public record. This is hardly novel. When I had a PO box years ago, the USPS would doggedly protect the privacy of box-holders. But if you were doing business with the public using the box, you didn't get the same protections, because they didn't want people using PO boxes to scam the public and then vanish.

I think forum anti-doxing etiquette is perfectly fine for the contexts in which it originated. But when we enter the public sphere of money and power, I think transparency is an important check on all sorts of malfeasance.


They have 400k of stock, though. It's common for a company not to keep a lot of cash around and borrow as needed against stock, which I would guess they are doing as they have 200k+ of creditors.

So, my guess is that they used income to build up stock of their clevo lines in order to reduce delivery times and increase their market to delivery sensitive customers, and now they are leveraging that to invest in the custom versions. If they are doing their own sw and there product is an integration of off the shelf parts, maybe it's doable.

Edited to add:

Actually I misread the statement, they have 200k falling due in a year and a further 700k of debt. So that's nearly 1M of investment, which seems easily enough to do this development, given it's much less complex than the framework devices.


It's a real company and many people have laptops from them. Here are a couple HN threads about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31034024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986767


I have the Byte desktop machine from them. I waited quite a bit for the delivery, but the machine is very nice.


This isn't a new company. They've made and shipped laptops in the past. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6IuzQehsrA


If real, it wouldn't surprise me.

A laptop isn't special. The most special part is the motherboard, and those are a dime a dozen designs. The bios soft is the other big component, but given the right partnerships I could see a small company just paying to use one out of a dozen various vendors.

The rest of the work is part sourcing.


What about the custom plastic parts? Aren't those injection moulded? If so, how much is a mould?


A mould is anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a small, simple, high-tolerance part, to many hundreds of thousands for a large, precision, complex mould with moving tools.


Now I'm thinking about whether I could CNC a laptop case from a brick of aluminum...


isn't that what apple did/does?


It is exactly, yes.

However doing this at small scale is very difficult to do cost-effectively.


There's comments in this thread claiming to have already received one. What's your take on that?


If that's the case then it must be something rebadged. What is it?


I have their latest starbook, just arrived a couple months ago and it is stellar. Covid delayed it almost a whole year, but in that time they upgraded frob adwertised 11th gen intel to 12th gen for free, quadrupling cores. It runs extremeley well with latest coreboot and everything. I considered canceling my pre-order because of the long delay, but Support was extremely quick and receptive and it turns out the trust they earned was warranted. I did a lot of research and really nothing comes close to these guys. This new one is expensive relatively, but the Starbook I have was a surprisingly good deal. No connection to them except a happy customer who can gladly recommend them.

Fully upgradable SSD and raM as well, I have 64 gigs and the touchpad is really really good.


I just spec'd one out and it was pretty similar to the I9 MBP. Personally, I'd pay that price for a Linux laptop that's on par with a MBP.


Do we really think the build quality of these is even in the same state, much less the same ballpark, as a MBP?


Do we really still think Apple products are the gold standard in hardware?


OS agnostic here (I’ve worked professionally in all three major OSes and on both Apple and a variety of Windows machines, currently enjoying WSL2 on my Dell XPS 9700).

Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great. My 2.5 year old Dell is currently with Dell for out of warranty repairs. I have no other windows machines left. All of them had an 4ish year lifespan are now dead and were not worth fixing. Current machine not withstanding; it’s too young to die.

Edit: I will add that I’m perfectly happy with my other windows machines, just that the build quality was such that I their natural lifespan was simply shorter.


> Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great.

Last time I looked at second hand laptops. Most of those the +5y old macbooks in the market had huge issues / defects (and also looked like shit) while you could find a lot of decent refurbished thinkpads and HP elitebook from the same era with no advertized defects (and those I bought didn't have any). I am excluding battery life as regarldess of the brand all needed a brand new one.

So they seem to be the gold standard when new. But they certainly don't age so well.


Many would agree that the middle years between 2015-2020 were not gold standard. It’s laughable to suggest Apple didn’t win the title back with the advent of the M1.


In term of perf/watts ratio yes. In term or reliability the jury is still out.


How many 10 year old M1s are on the secondhand market?


Another sample, my MBP set itself on fire in the boot of my car (examination revealed, the thunderbolt or whatever chip ignited).

My XPS13 is going strong after years of abuse and being lugged around the world in hand luggage.

My old powerbook and ibook (remember those?!) Both had live current running through the case screws which caused a stingy shock on bare legs.

I've never seen an Apple laptop that didn't look nice but ultimately have weird issues


My dell XPS has been going strong for 5 years now, replaced the battery and upgraded the SSD in that time but it's been a pretty impressive machine and definitely on par with apple laptops I've had in the past


Genuinely curious what is better. MacBook Pros have been the gold standard for a while and now with the ARM chips they are pretty much unbeatable in my eyes.


Thinkpad for me is the gold standard because I can swap out the components and they have videos and guides of how to do so on their website. Their materials are sturdy and light.

MacBooks may use some nice materials, and their processors are interesting, but for a customer like me that prefers to install the hardware and software of my choice either today or in ten years, they have no products I'm interested in.

I've never had to sell or retire any machine I've had in the last twenty years, they're all somewhere doing something right now.


Personally, I tend to err on the side of hardware that can take a fall from waist-height and not set me back $600. To each their own though, I guess.


What kind of computer hardware meets that criteria? Toughbooks?


Thinkpads haven't failed me yet, even if it's a cliched response. The display isn't apt to breaking like a Macbook, and the chassis does a surprisingly good job reducing shock (even on later models). Toughbooks are probably a shoo-in with that logic, and I'd like to try one of HP's recent Elitebooks to see how they stack up.

My Macs usually stay at home if I have a more rugged machine to take with me, just for the peace of mind. It's probably a matter of personal distrust, but I'm a clumsy guy...


Thinkpad build quality is definitely on a slow decline. There's a lot more plastic casework in a new model than in a T440, say. They don't feel completely rigid in hand any more. And that's before the loss of a removable, upgradeable battery and the advent of soldered RAM.

A second hand T-series is still what I'd default to if I need a laptop for now (especially for the keyboard), but I'm aware that this is likely not going to forever remain the obvious choice it used to be.


Agreed, I'm waiting for the verdict to come back on Framework or some Linux OEMs before I upgrade my T460s. The product line isn't headed in a formidable direction, but I'm glad that there have been other manufacturers eying the space.


at least Thinkpad and Gram just from my own direct experience.

But in years past a mbp and an imac that never fell an inch killed themselves from the bad video chips, which Apple and their supposedly gold standard support refused to warranty and by the time they lost in court years later the damage was already done and cost various friends the price of new machines.

Other that those famous examples like that and the keyboards, just in general among all the machines I intersect with, the Apples don't fare any better. They all get busted screens, busted ports, busted hinges, exploded batteries. In fact HP and Apple seem to have to most cases of glued in batteries that expand and break the rest of the machine.


So far my Framework has met that criteria. It's taken a few tumbles.


Currently, especially with the addition of the ARM CPU, I think yes. I have a pretty new MBP (~1 year old) and it's great but my previous MBP had cooling problems - almost anything made it go lawn mower mode.


Apple people think that. They rarely leave their walled garden.


How is the sound quality? Is it comparable to a MacBook?


I'm really curious about people that actually use laptop speakers. Even the best laptop speakers I've heard (I've heard MacBook speakers too) sound terrible. Other than for a quick video or demo or whatever, who is seriously listening to videos or music on laptop speakers... And why??? Even a cheap pair of earbuds sounds better to me.


I find the MBP 14" and 16" speakers pretty serviceable for lightweight TV watching.

I have a 7.1.4 system at home and obviously there's no comparison but they sound good enough for most series I watch when I'm on the go - mostly on travels.

They're also very good for meetings. I find them much better than any enterprise equipment (Jabra etc) I've ever used.

Sure, good headphones will usually sound better, but I'd rather not have my ears covered all the time. To each their own, I guess.


Try good half-open cans like Beyerdynamic DT880, i can wear them for hours. I like the sound better than fully open Headphones, compared them to the DT990s. With my closed DT770 my ears get uncomfortably warm pretty fast.


I have all sorts of headphones. Open backs, half-open, closed backs, some of them are absolutely amazing.

I'd still mostly rather not wear anything most of the time. This is especially true those times when the laptop speakers prove the most useful - when I'm just chilling out, possibly in bed. I'd also rather not have to deal with wires during those times.

My main issue is not so much warmth but mostly the fact that my ears are covered, simple as that. I'm not neurotic about it but I prefer to have them open. Sometimes I'll take the sound quality hit and wear my bone conducing headset over wearing great sounding headphones.


I have a 2019 16" MBP and love the speakers. I regularly use them for music listening, Netflix and Youtube.


Just to pile on here, the 2019-2021 refresh Intel Macbook Pro 13 and 16 have laptop speakers that rival good portable bluetooth speakers complete with shockingly deep bass, clear midrange and defined treble. They are by far and away the best laptop speakers I've heard. Nice decently powered headphone jack as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNUz-cqkjVA

https://youtu.be/LGOmbNRlZdM?t=215


I use laptop speakers a few times a year, when I bring the device to my bedroom and just listen to a long interview with the screen turned off. Laying on the bed with headphones on my head is not something I would do. Earbuds I have not used in 15 years.


My partner has a Lenovo Yoga from like 2 generations ago and she's really happy with their sound. Its soundbar was one of the selling points. And it does indeed deliver


> Even a cheap pair of earbuds sounds better to me.

That doesn't work very well if there's more than one of you trying to watch...


Relive the days of being a playground boss: https://aliexpress.com/item/32835649231.html


I'm seeing conflicting comments about the RAM. You say you're an owner and it has upgradable RAM, other commenters here are saying the RAM is soldered. Is only this new model soldered?


This new model is soldered unfortunately which allows it to use low power raM


how does touchpad compare to MBP one?


They are very good, multi finger gestures worked out of the box on fedora


this is what i want to know, the part you touch looks on point, what i want to know about is the software, there is so much secret sauce in a macbooks giant glass touchpad that actually makes it a reasonable replacement for a mouse

didn't feel that about any touchpad before the macbook, and it's why we loved thinkpad's so much because at least they gave you a nub


my thoughts exactly. before getting MBP about 10 years ago I couldn't even imagine not using mouse with laptop, but after a day or so with MBP and its touchpad it changed 180 degrees and now mouse feel unnatural (and requires way more movement of hands).

I would love to see Linux laptop that works like that.


Have they actually made one yet? The pictures on the site all look like renders; and I couldn't find any pictures of an actual prototype anywhere.


> Have they actually made one yet?

Exactly. No real laptops so far; no videos with honest in-depth reviews; no information on the dirability of these machines.

If something is too good to be true, it likely is.


I am typing this on their latest StarBook. It's a great machine. As for durability, it has an aluminium body and seems sturdily built. I expect it to last a good few years.


would you be able to share a video or blog review of this thing ?


There are comments here from people that have them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760276


If you are talking about YouTube reviews. Please tell me where you find in-depth honest reviews.

Because every channel I have seen on anything...Is claiming independent reviews, while getting product test samples loaned for 1 or 2 years. Engaging on a direct contact with the marketing departments of the vendors, and working under the certainty that if they ever do a thoughtful and true review with a bad rating, the vendor wont send any more samples.


linus tech tips?


Linus seems a nice guy, but with 20 or more employees, and a channel that needs to review products first, works with embargoes organized by the vendors. As any YouTube business, competes for views. A really bad (honest?) review won't get him more samples. So the incentives are on the wrong place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28608132

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/y95kt4/what_...


There’s an entire subreddit that has people discussing theirs.


YouTube has review videos


I guess it was for the discerning - but not too discerning - buyer


I mean, all their laptops looks like that, and they have a pretty good track record of following through. I'm in the market for a new laptop, and a 4-5 month lead time is a bit too far out. Maybe I'll purchase one when they're actually shipping, but by then I'm sure I'll be happy with whatever frankentop I cobble together.


There are pics of a protoype in their Twitter feed. Also you can see lots of pics/videos of their previous model laptops: https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/

(Star Labs has been around for years making Linux laptops)


You can buy the Starbook, and there are reviews on youtube.


Soldered ram is pretty unfortunate. They're also charging a ton for storage upgrades (e.g. $300 vs market rate of ~$80 for 1TB pcie 4.0 ssd).


As usual. Not sure why this is, they could just charge for the labor that it actually costs them to put a different SSD in plus material cost, but no, they always mark up ridiculous amounts. It basically forces people to buy a dummy SSD with the device plus a loose one and then put it in yourself... at least that's what I do for myself and family whenever it saves more than 50 euros and takes me 5-10 minutes (usually it saves ~100 euros to buy extra hardware on top of what you already get in the laptop(!)).

If anyone is interested in unusably tiny and/or slow SSDs, let me know because right now they're just going in e-waste.

(I have similar beef with drinks in restaurants at, e.g., ~100x markup for tap water. Why not just charge a normal price for both the food and the drinks, instead of me having to guess at how much I should be spending on drinks to compensate the normal-priced food? Or make both cheap and charge a table fee, whatever floats their boat. This incentivizes people to not drink enough; usually it's calories where people overingest, not hydration!)


Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've bought many a device with the minimum RAM and disk space which I will then throw out and replace with third party stuff. I get why many vendors do it, but I hate the waste. I'm more willing to forgive it in a general-audience company than people who are selling to the kind of technical audience who can all do the swap.


I have literally never seen a restaurant anywhere in the world that charges for tap water, and I eat out constantly. Is this a thing now somewhere?


Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and more limited experience in Luxembourg. (I've been to more places but honestly don't remember what drink prices were like in Finland ten years ago, let alone remembering what the Icelandic króna prices amounted to when I was there more recently.)

It's often not offered because it sounds like asking for a free drink instead of paying ~13 euros per liter which seems to be the average norm. Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water (edit: that means bottled/branded; the default they'll bring you if unspecified), which in turn is the same price as any soft drink (demonstrating that the price has nothing to do with cost, it must be paying for the table or something but it doesn't say so I don't know).

Anyway, it's more about places charging dishonest prices to seemingly cover for something else, leaving the consumer to guessing why in the world this might cost so much and just going with another option. I can't imagine it achieves the intended goal, so it doesn't seem like a good idea for either party. If anyone ever did finances for a restaurant or has a better-than-guessing idea why SSDs are priced this way, I'd be very curious.


> Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water,

I don't think I'll be able to make sense of what you're saying until you explain what you mean by "normal water". Are you referring to branded bottled water?


Ah, sorry yes, that was bad phrasing on my part. By normal I meant what was on the menu (water that is branded, bottled, shipped, sometimes stolen) instead of my out-of-the-ordinary request (tap water), but calling that the 'normal' is of course a culture-specific way of thinking, and a cultural feature I do not like.


In these places where bottled water is the norm, do you have to specify what brand you want? Like if they ask what you want to drink and you answer "I'll just have water", is that an incomplete response?


They charge more for these things because people will pay it and they like making more money


Also because the labor costs of service don’t change based on what people are carrying around.


Wait until you find out that every place in the Netherlands and Germany charges you money to take a piss or a dump. Even places like McDonalds and gas stations. Some people make sure it goes on the side of the building instead.


Restaurants don't charge you for toilet usage in NL 0r DE when you are a paying customer, neither does McDonald's. (Yes, it's up for debate whether that's a restaurant :))


It does happen, in certain locations and under certain circumstances. And I really can't blame them, when toilet-only visitors start outnumbering paying customers by a considerable margin. When all your anecdotal data is from Oktoberfest surroundings and the like you might come to certain conclusions.


Are there public restrooms available in those places? If not, that's extremely frustrating. I don't understand why more places don't have public restrooms. People are gonna poop one way or the other.


If you search for wtallis in this thread you'll find a technical reason for soldered ram. Can't respond with a link since on mobile, did it several hours ago at home though.


They've clearly learned some things from Apple.


Unfortunately low power ddr4 (lpddr4) does not come on SODIMs, soldered ram is the only way to get it. I know everyone likes to shit on apple about this, (and they definitely should about soldered storage) but there are practical engineering reasons for soldered ram. Note that the framework laptop has abysmal battery life relative to the competition.


Note that modern apple ram is not just soldered but actually in the SoC package. Sucks for upgradability, but that’s how they get 400Gb/s UMA speeds.


In-package RAM vs soldered on the motherboard next to the SoC package makes no difference to the bandwidth: GPUs take the latter approach to achieve equal or higher bandwidth. In either case, having a memory bus wider than 128 bits is a major factor in offering higher bandwidth than mainstream platforms. (Wide memory buses are easier to lay out on a PCB when routing to BGA memory packages than [SO]DIMM slots.)


But why doesn't it come on SODIMMS? Is there a technical reason for that or does nobody make the modules because all vendors use soldered?


It might have to do with cost, although I'm not sure.


I would argue the main "catch" is the price.

Laptops with similar specs and features (minus coreboot) are available 25% to 50% cheaper from vendors that care a lot less about Linux support.


Do you have an example of a such a laptop at 25-50% cheaper?

The models I've seen from Dell and Lenovo with 4k screens and 64 GB ram tend to be in the 2500 EUR range.

And, for some reason, you usually can't get this much RAM and a 4k screen with an AMD CPU.

HP has EliteBooks with upgradeable RAM (both slots!) so you could do your own upgrade, but you'd have to put up with a ridiculously crappy screen. I also don't know if they've upgraded to ryzen 6000.


> HP has EliteBooks with upgradeable RAM (both slots!) so you could do your own upgrade, but you'd have to put up with a ridiculously crappy screen. I also don't know if they've upgraded to ryzen 6000.

They have, I'm typing on one. The display I have is crappy BUT they have four or five different displays in the 14" 16:10 format and swapping one for another is relatively simple.


OK, I seen they have Gen9 models available with ryzen 6000, and still have upgradable DIMMS. However, to the original poster's point, they ask a little over 1700 EUR for an 8 GB RAM machine. Upgrading to 64 would bring it around 2000 EUR, and you'd still be stuck with a shitty screen.

On my Gen8 model, I have the "high-end" display. It's admittedly very bright, but the colors and viewing angles are terrible. Some say it's because it has the privacy screen. That may be the case for the viewing angles, but the colors are atrocious even judging by the specs. At work, they have no privacy screens and colors still suck. At best, you get something like 72% NTSC (which is smaller than sRGB). The Gen9 models I see on their French website have a 16:10 ratio (which, I think, is great) but only... 45% NTSC!


> strange ergonomic decisions

The keyboard is offset to the left because of the extra row of vertical keys on the right, so touch typists will have their right hand shifted toward the left more than normal. But the trackpad is still centered on the frame... so the right hand will be greatly overlapping the trackpad.

Visually, having the trackpad centered relative to the G/H keys would look imbalanced, but it would be ergonomic. But unfortunately they went for visual style over ergonomics on this one.


I do not really get why they would try to support both AMD and Intel .. given that these are obviously small runs. Where do they get the mainboards for this and how can they manage any testing and tuning? They do at least acknowledge that Coreboot for AMD might not be available at the time of shipping. It seems optimistic to say you can adopt it later when it is not ready yet.

Other than that, I would not mind paying a premium for a well made laptop with these specs. Still hoping System76 will get there someday.


Wow, looks and sounds just great. If I just hadn't bought a framework this would be tempting, as they even have an AMD option - however not the 4TB SSD (should be simple to add though)?

But happy that I have the Framework now and thus don't need to choose :D


Two downsides. One is the lack of number pad even in 15.6 inch laptops. Another is the lack of even a single memory DIMM slot so that I can upgrade RAM. Rest of the things I can live with. The only reason I buy 15 inch laptop is for the dedicated number pad. Many new laptop manufacturers has excellent specs except for the keyboard choice. Just include a number pad in all big laptops please. Thank you!


- A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card.

- Matte only option is a weird default over a glossy screen with an optional matte screen protector

- Corporate pricing (+324 gbp to go from 32gb to 64gb ram)

- Keyboard looks like crap

- Only 1 year warranty

- Like you said, 4-5 month lead time

- Plastic?

Basically, you can get better for less, with next day delivery


A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card is exactly what I would prefer. I would also prefer glossy, tho. But yeah, I don't get why there are no laptops with high power CPUs that don't include a dGPU, for compiling and many other CPU heavy tasks, there's absolutely no need to go over an iGPU, with a Radeon 680m being almost level with an RX 6400.


> A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card is exactly what I would prefer.

OK, so you are not interested in games, machine learning, 8k60, or any other thing that depends on a dedicated GPU.

But you are willing to blow $2000 on a laptop. That's a very niche situation.


A lot of people don't need to run the latest AAA blingfest at max settings, run ML workloads on localhost, or drive freaking 8k displays on the go.

And yet, people want quality hardware, good screens, comfortable input devices, and snappy enough hardware to either do work on them or consume online content without going blind.

I'm looking to replace a T490 to improve on the shitty screen that came with it, get a faster CPU with moar cores to compile code faster, and take advantage of the latest iGPU performance jump to drive the 4k display. That's pretty much it.


I bought a high end MBP nearly 10 years ago with discrete GPU, thinking I would use it for numerical physics simulations, graphics development (I used to be a game engine dev), and maybe even games.

Turns out in that nearly 10 years I've hardly used the dGPU at all. The only time I have it enabled is because it's necessary for driving an external display. The things I've run on it in practice just don't use much GPU.

For compute-intensive things I ended up using big, rented servers, which got faster while my laptop aged. For desktop graphics the iGPU has been adequate, and I ended up not really playing games or doing any ML, simulations or video encoding on it. Compiling, editing, filesystem things, code analysis, data storage and indexing, those don't need GPU at all. The browser does but in practice it's so CPU and memory bound, the dGPU vs iGPU difference is not something I've noticed affect browsing.

One game I played for a while, Tux Racer, did work better with dGPU enabled, but that's not enough reason to buy one if it's an optional and expensive feature. However in practice on a MBP you needed the dGPU to get max specs for the other components, which I needed (in fact the RAM was never enough), so it was still a good choice.


I could see opting for a 15/16” machine with no dedicated GPU, simply because the size of it means the cooling system is likely large enough to keep the CPU at reasonable temps without keeping fans spun up the vast majority of the time.

For a short while I had a 15” laptop with a high power AMD CPU and high power Nvidia GPU (5900HS/3080) and while the power was nice, it was much more noisy and hot than I prefer in a laptop so I returned it. Now if I need graphical muscle I turn to a tower, which can provide that in vast quantities with a fraction of the fan noise.


My laptop (Lenovo legion 7) has a vapor chamber cooling system is shared by the CPU and GPU, so when you're only using the CPU it will have the full cooling power of the laptop.

If you prefer you can disable the dGPU too.


You can pay for a longer warranty however if they are shipping this to Europe they need to warranty it for 2 years irregardless in Europe.


Memory is soldered. Their other laptop has upgradable memory.


Lpddr5 can't be made on a dimm.


Key travel is not specified. I wonder if it's decent.

Other than that it looks good. Kudos for the matte screen the framework doesn't offer.


Just the number 1 most important spec of any large screen laptop: the weight?


https://de.starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter-specification

1.4 kg, so considerably heavier than the LG gram 16 (that unfortunately isn't available in 32G+) but also far from being an outlier in the other direction


ISO keyboard layout.


You can select "English (US)" for ANSI


The laws of physics and known documented battery technology prohibit an 18 hr battery life with that screen and any choices of CPUs, and the limit of 99Wh battery capacity (you cannot take any individual battery beyond 100Wh on commercial flights in the USA and Europe).


Does anyone here run any of these OSes on any of the offered screen densities and resolutions? I have questions.

- Surely not every old program available from the repositories will work with display scaling, will they? I've never had to use it, maybe Xorg has some hack to scale certain windows at 2x so you don't need support from individual packages. I'm also thinking of things like Burp Suite, which have window-like objects that interact horribly with things like i3 (from what I see with colleagues), so those might have similar issues when you have to tell Xorg to scale individual windows up. Is this something you run into?

- How much of an impact does that resolution have on battery life and GPU performance? I do not need more than 1920x1080 pixels on a 16" diagonal, my eyes can hardly read small fonts on that DPI as it is (I'm ~30) and they're not going to get better with age. This laptop ships with either double or quadruple that, making me wonder what the trade-off is like of having this (for me) gimmick. Surely it doesn't double/quadruple the battery drain or halve/quarter the performance compared to a normal screen?

- I also don't see flickering at 60 Hz (heck, 24 Hz TV looks smooth to me), so 165 Hz seems again like a battery drainer and performance reducer. How much of an impact does it have to try and render 2.75x as many frames per second on a GPU? Does it simply use 2.75x more power for the GPU or reduce the number of drawing operations you can do on the GPU by 2.75 times, or does this not work that way?

Edit: this is currently at the top, but I don't want the top comment to be criticism. This product is awesome in virtually every other regard besides shipping time. Good physical size, decent number of USB ports, customization of the keyboard, c-c-coreboot?! Officially supported? I am definitely impressed. Heck, even the payment methods impress me, being able to select iDeal at a small foreign shop.


Regarding scaling: If you use 2x scaling it should be easy with any distribution. Fractional scaling is a bit trickier to get.

I am using a Framework with 1.5x scaling using Fedora KDE and it’s amazing. Didn’t find any app yet that doesn’t conform. One difference to years ago is Wayland vs X. With X it was a constant struggle for me while with Wayland and more years invested, scaling became a non-issue on Linux (for me).

Regarding burp suite, iirc this is a JVM based app. I am running Jetbrains products without any issues and no configuration needs. Assuming burp suite uses swing, I would assume no issue. Generally, you can quickly check with a VM. Using Fedora KDE is a great „Just Works“ experience.


Mint Cinnamon with X works fine at 1.5x on the Framework. Took a click in the display control panel.


Xorg has a lot of accumulated hacks that make scaling work ok-ish. It falls apart when you have multiple monitors with different scaling, but for a laptop, just close the lid when you dock it and it should be good enough.

Wayland, after much feet dragging (why this wasn't a day-1 feature for a supposed Xorg replacement is beyond me), finally managed to cobble together basic support for non-integer scaling [0], so it should finally Just Werk (tm), regardless of if you scale at 2x, 1.75x, etc. without looking like a blurry mess.

I don't have experience with 4k displays in laptops, but I will say this: considering AMD's ongoing problems with idle power draw on >120 Hz displays [1], I'd recommend not getting the 165 Hz display if you're getting an AMD CPU.

[0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/k92b2x/psa_if_you_have...


> It falls apart when you have multiple monitors with different scaling

Yeah that's my colleagues! This is why half the monitors in the office are not being used :D. Someone thought it was a great idea to get three or four 4k screens but only one person actually wants them; everyone wants their laptop as a second or third screen. (Personally I'm a single-screen type of person anyway, but what made me commandeer a 1080p screen is the very noticeable lag that my 2018 i5 Lenovo had when trying to drive a 4k screen with or without display scaling. Got a new work laptop now that ought to not have that problem, but I haven't bothered trying yet.)

Anyhow, thanks for the pointers! Especially that 120 Hz AMD thing sounds like a big caveat.


Running an xrandr script with ’--scale’ when you plug in the externals works okay for me. I have a 4k laptop monitor and 2 X 1k externals. It's perfectly fine for work use cases.

This is on i3wm btw


Couldn't you just feed a 4k screen a 1080p resolution? It's a bit annoying if it defaults to 4K every time you plug in I guess. If you can use HDMI, you could get an inline EDID adapter.


Fractional scaling in Wayland still needs some work in my experience. Primarily, apps running through XWayland look blurry which sucks because there’s a decent number that font natively support Wayland yet (or have it behind an experimental flag with caveats, like how Anki loses its native titlebar and window shadow when Wayland support is turned on).


- AFAIK, it's usually the toolkits that do the scaling. So, it's indeed possible that very old apps, if they're still using old versions of the toolkits, don't support scaling. They'll appear non-scaled, so "at 100%".

- I don't have a 4k display on a laptop so can't comment on battery life. But for "desktop use" (read: non gaming) GPU performance has been fine for a long time. I have an old desktop at work with a 4th gen i5 and whatever the integrated GPU was at the time. It can drive a 4k panel at 60 Hz just fine. A somewhat newer laptop, 8th gen i5 with a uhd620 integrated GPU could drive its internal FHD panel and an external UHD display without any issue.

- For your eyes comment: the small fonts may be illegible because they're blurry. On FHD screens, I've found that bitmap fonts are much more legible at small sizes. I've seen some Dell with a 4k display at work, probably 15", and the small text was much more legible than on my 14" FHD laptop (compared using Windows 11 - the guy was a Windows dev).

- TV has a blurriness to its movement, so it looks smooth enough because it's never actually sharp. The point of higher refresh rates is not "flickering", but a smooth movement. Try reading a scrolling page on a 30 Hz, 60 Hz, 120 Hz screen. I mostly look at static text on my screens, so 60 Hz works well enough for me, and I prefer higher resolution / better colors to higher refresh rates. Don't know how this affects GPU usage, though I don't expect it to be "free".


From experience on Windows, "very old toolkits" includes QT5. It gets very confused if the scaling changes while the screen is closed.


I only have experience with this on Linux, where at least it supports scaling, so that if you use a constant one (my case), then it's OK.

Older ones will simply ignore the scaling settings and draw the interface 1-to-1. One such application that comes to mind is VMWare's remote console (for esx). I haven't used it in a few years, but I remember at the time it was painful to run on a 24" UHD screen.

On the windows side, I think things are somewhat better than on Linux, but there still is confusion, including Windows 11 22h2's start menu. If you start the computer in 100% mode, then plug an external screen scaled at 200%, it works OK for the app list (what it shows on first click) but if you start typing everything becomes a blurry mess.

---

Edit: I actually think QT is one of the better toolkits, at least on Linux, in the case of scaling. IIRC it's able to adapt the scaling based on the screen DPI reported by X, so a full qt desktop should be able to handle situations like a high-DPI laptop connected to a low-dpi monitor.


It's not that it ignores it, it's that it tried to handle it and gets confused. I move fairly frequently between my 3x laptop screen and a 1x external monitor, and at this point I've got used to either the app logo randomly being a third the size it should be in the start bar or the text rendering three times as big as it should in the app.


> my eyes can hardly read small fonts on that DPI as it is (I'm ~30) and they're not going to get better with age

If you double the DPI it's going to be easier to read those fonts.


I have a bad left eye. I haven’t noticed increased readability from higher dpi screens. I went from a higher dpi to a 14” 1080 screen and notice no difference at equivalent font size. Of course that’s still pretty high pixel density.


Higher pixel density can help a bit if your vision is bad enough that you use a lot of screen magnification, as it means that the magnified text will be better-rounded and fuller, rather than almost unrecognizably pixelated.

For some visual impairments, though, the improved sharpness from higher DPI may be basically undetectable, which sounds like what you're reporting.


> This laptop ships with either double or quadruple that, making me wonder what the trade-off is like of having this (for me) gimmick. Surely it doesn't double/quadruple the battery drain or halve/quarter the performance compared to a normal screen?

From their configuration site:

"The 4K display consumes more power, averaging 8W but provides incredible detail and excellent scaling support that allows you to change the UI (User Interface) to a size that's comfortable for almost everyone.

The QHD display supports a refresh rate of 165Hz, which offers a silky smooth experience. It consumes less than half the power of the 4K display at 3.2W. Limited scaling support on Linux means that the UI on this display is relatively small compared to other display resolutions"

It seems like the QHD display would be the way to go for lower power. I'd guess the power would be lower if you didn't run it at the full 165Hz refresh (there's probably a 60Hz mode)...


It's not the screen that I was afraid of so much as the processing power. From my understanding, the main power draw of a screen comes from its light output and area size (they advertise with about double or triple the nits mine has) rather than from how many pixels it has. Regardless, it's a good point that I should not ignore the screen while considering the processing power needed to drive said screen!


Well, there is the backlight, but also the power usage of the TCON (timing controller board) for each display that will vary greatly. Usually the 4K ones end up being less efficient. If you get the 4K display, you can of course set the output to 1080p which would solve the "processing power" end. I think the difference between 1080p and 1440p (or their 16:10 equivalents) at 60Hz would be negligible from a GPU perspective (especially if PSR is set on), but ultimately you'd have to test the two different models with different resolution settings to really be able to tell.


> I think the difference between 1080p and 1440p (or their 16:10 equivalents) at 60Hz would be negligible from a GPU perspective

It is close to twice the number of pixels.

1080p = 2.073.600

1440p = 3.686.400

2160p = 8.294.400


With imperfect eye sight, I find it much easier to read text with higher DPI. For me 11-12” is the limit for 1080p. At 16” I’d want at least 1440p. Even 4K starts getting blocky above 24” or so, 27” is barely ok.


I use a 4K laptop with Fedora on Wayland/KDE, and display scaling worked perfectly fine out of the box.


Display refresh rate isn't necessarily just about one aspect like flicker or smoothness.

For one thing, it affects the latency from human input to graphics output. How the graphics stack is implemented, especially with modern desktop compositors, there's typically at least 3 frames of latency. 3/60 is 50ms. 3/165 is 18ms. Whether or not you consciously notice it, the 165hz display is going to feel more instant when you push a button.

There's also what's referred to as "judder". When you're watching 24Hz video content on a 60Hz display, the frames of video get repeated 3 times, then 2 times, then 3 times etc. This results in a 16ms "judder" from frame to frame. It's subtle, and has been the norm for decades, but it is quantifiably less than ideal. A 165Hz display drops judder down to 6ms.

Another aspect of the refresh rate has to do with the frequency response of the display technology itself, and what many might call "smoothness". Looking back at CRT technology, the image is instantaneous wherever the electron beam is currently pointed. The overall image looks stable due to persistence within the human eye. If you film a CRT, it can look pretty wonky. With a CRT, 30Hz is too slow because pretty much everyone can see the flicker. 60Hz is borderline on a CRT, and I personally can see the flicker in my peripheral vision. Motion looks smooth regardless, though, because all the persistence is in your eyes. With traditional LCDs, the pixels are always on, and they are relatively slow to change; there's persistence in the display itself. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, and all motion looks blurry no matter what. It just sucks other than being a conveniently flat screen. With modern LCDs and OLED displays, the pixels are still always on, but they are back to being very fast to change. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, but motion is no longer blurry, but instead of flickering it looks jerky rather than smooth. At 60Hz things look pretty smooth, but you're still at the limit of some folk's peripheral vision.

A GPU doesn't have to render frames at the refresh rate. An old frame will be repeated if there isn't a new frame ready yet. If the GPU can't keep up, a 165Hz display effectively becomes an 82.5Hz display, or a 41.25Hz display. There certainly is going to be a power penalty in the GPU circuitry driving the display at a higher rate, but it's marginal vs. the cost of rendering the frames themselves. 82Hz is still luxury compared to 60Hz, in that it's better than good enough for 99% of people.

What it boils down to is that pushing the refresh rate higher gives the GPU/software more fine grained control over the display than otherwise. That control allows the software to optimize latency, judder, and smoothness better than the display itself can given a lower refresh rate.


This is definitely cool stuff. When you want official vendor support on something like coreboot + various linux distros, I've come to expect you pay double of today's prices but get hardware from a few years ago. This looks like modern hardware and the premium is honestly manageable. Slightly above what I'd want to spend but I could see myself paying this for a great product, also because you get more than just 2 USB-A ports and more than just 1 USB-C port (that seems to be the best most other vendors have to offer)! However, what made me close the tab is the "we are not even going to give you a shipping indication other than to expect close to half a year" (knowing how these types of things like to change deadlines anyway, starting off at four months... no). If I spend thousands of euros now, I also want the product in a reasonable amount of time (say, 3 weeks including customization and shipping; 0.5-2 weeks for a stock product plus shipping).

My current laptop is still performing well enough unfortunately, but ask me again in six months when the units are in and available to be shipped, and good odds that I'll hit that purchase button!


I’m really curious to know what piece of hardware you’re talking about, as you’ve apparently replied to the wrong post. But I really want the hardware you’re describing!


Oh crap, yeah you're right. Can't delete it now and move it to the right thread because of the comment heh. I thought I had the thread about this laptop open in this tab: https://starlabs.systems/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759507

Not sure whether to re-post it there or flag my own comment or something.


No worries! I've moved it now. You should be able to remove your /edit bit if you want to.


Pricing seems extremely high for the specs once you start to configure.

I really want to see a company do something compelling here but there is always one thing that's off...pricing, screen, last gen processors. I switched back to Linux last year and ended up getting a $900 Lenovo that has been excellent. Would have tried System76 or Framework if their hardware could keep up.


I agree that pricing might be their biggest challenge. Matte 4k X1 Carbon ThinkPads in like-new condition go for around $1k on eBay, and they run Linux fine, so long as you're willing to install non-free firmware. I'm not sure what kind of premium I'd be willing to pay to get the faster boot and libre firmware from a company with no track record at all in the marketplace. I've recently upgraded the SSD in my T480s that's running Debian, and I figure I have another 2 or 3 years before I'll feel the need to go shopping for something better. Maybe when the used ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 AMD machines start hitting eBay in force.

I also own a Framework laptop, and the 3:2 aspect ratio is a killer feature for me. It's really hard to go back to 16:10 after using that for a while.


Prices are extremely high before you configure. These are apple prices without an apple warranty.

When I had keyboard issues I had my laptop flown out with 1 day overnight shipping and the same back to me. When the refurb I purchased has a loose hinge, I got a full refund with no hassle. When my laptop was stolen during delivery, I got a replacement sent out with a 12 minute phone call.

I suspect this small operation cannot match this.


Fair, but you certainly pay for this in other ways with apple. I can afford to buy 2-3 laptops for the price you pay for one. And in most cases those types of events never come into play. Apple crushes on battery life but I've yet to come close to needing that much, performance is similar otherwise.


I missed that! I cheered for the success in a previous comment (despite not willing to give out 1300+ and not having it for long time).

But that is with i3 and 240G SSD?! My base config is 2300GBP, that is ridiculous. Then waiting the minimum of 4-5 months (for some on Twitter over 12 months and still waiting). After giving out this ammount having nothing for looong time. To a 4 person startup in debt and being sligtly longer in the market than the delivery window.

No way, it will never work.


They're selling a privacy-conscious Linux laptop with open firmware that's assembled in a place that isn't so privacy-friendly.[0]

I think a lot of people would pay extra for assembly in a western country. These appear made to order, so the risk of hardware implantation targeting is almost certainly real.

[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2059/5897/products/StarFig...


Update:

https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/why-choose-us

Assembled, imaged and programmed in the UK.

Configured by our own engineers, giving you peace of mind that you get what you want with no hidden extras.

Not sure if that's outdated or what to believe.


Going all-in on privacy and hardware trust, one could also wish for a Raptor Talos portable workstation running a POWER CPU. I don't think they'd scale down to proper laptop size though.


Combined with the high risk of being a high target honeypot I'd be worried of that Chinese MITM.


I really want to like this laptop but...

If you go to their twitter, its a constant barrage of angry customers who havent received their orders in over a year.

I dont think im okay with shelling out $3000, waiting possibly over a year, and being told "we are working on it" the entire time.

I personally just went with Tuxedo for a linux first laptop.


Except for the wonky webcam (which I can live with), and the lack of GPU (which I'm less sure about; I do a lot of ML workloads), this laptop is exactly the laptop I'd buy, if I knew it actually existed.

Problem is, I'm not confident it actually will exist.

The webcam decision is wonky. My Thinkpad has a little cover I can slide over the webcam. I can buy aftermarket stick-on covers too. Why the complex magnetic mess + storage compartment?


Web cam is also mic and the ability to know it’s completely removed is good because you often see physical mic switches that only disable via software. Also there are facilities that don’t allow any hardware with either


There are many great features in this laptop, mainly no numberpad and 16:10 screen. I didn't check weight and user serviceability. They don't have the keyboard layout for my county (Italy) but I can live with that because my fingers know where keys are and I work with the USA layout most of the time. The only showstopper is the touchpad without physical buttons. I copy and paste text the X11 way by selecting and clicking the middle button. How do you do that effectively without buttons? I always took care of buying laptops with three buttons above and/or below the touchpad.


They have a “custom” option for keyboard layout. It costs more; presumably, they could do Italian. I assume the extra cost is because someone has to physically put it in the exceptions box at the factory, due to small volume (not due to them designing that layout from scratch for you).


Regarding user serviceability, for the Starbook (which I own) they have a complete pictorial disassembly guide: https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/guides/starbook-mk-v-com...

I’d expect the same tbh.


This new laptop has soldered-down RAM. It's due to the LPDDR5 which is only electrically able to reach 6400MT/s if the memory socket is skipped, so no blame for it. Just be aware.


Thank you, so it's on my no buy list now. Too bad.

I elaborate: a faulty RAM chip happens. If it's socketed I buy a new chip and replace it. It might take a few days, about 100 Euros, problem solved. With soldered RAM I'm expecting to have to either buy a new motherboard from a company that by the time might even don't exist anymore or find some repair center able to dissolder the faulty chip and solder the new one. Time and cost are much worse.

I would think about it if this was HP, with on site next business day support, but they are not. And even with HP, what happens after support is over, which is typically three cheap years plus increasingly costly extensions? Last time I checked I got a quote for (I think) some 400 euro for a keyboard replacement. I bought a keyboard myself and replaced it. This brings us to the availability of spare parts, which might be a risk for this brand.

All considered this is not a laptop I can use to make money with.


Thanks. It seems that the keyboard is the last component in the disassembly sequence. It's the component that I replaced most in all my laptops because I either dig a hole in the most used keys or I break the mechanics below them. They last me two or three years.


3-finger click

I do that often even on thinkpad with physical buttons.


Three-finger click is common for middle click.


Needs a little red nub in the center of the keyboard.


The HP DevOne has one. Shame about that washed-out glossy screen (some say it has a built-in privacy filter).


The HP Dev One follows the HP EliteBook's poor design of pairing the pointing stick with 2 mouse buttons instead of 3. Without the middle mouse button, you can't scroll with the pointing stick and you'll need to use the trackpad (or apply some hack to the 2 available buttons), which makes the pointing stick a less effective tool.


You can scroll with the Dev One's pointing stick. Just hold down both mouse buttons, as two buttons emulate a middle click.


I've tried that, and it was so uncomfortable to hold down both mouse buttons with one thumb that I did not find this workaround worthwhile. It was awkward using both thumbs to do the same.


I guess this design problem is no more because the latest elitebooks got rid of the trackpoint entirely.


The Elitebook model that the Dev One is based off of has a SureView screen, which is what the Dev One ships with. That's to say it is an intentional privacy filter. I didn't find it to be washed out and the gloss is comparable to a MBP from a few years ago.


Reference is old enough that we're not sure if you're joking.


ThinkPads are still popular, so I don't see this as a joke. A pointing stick (TrackPoint) is excellent for people who want to use both the keyboard and the mouse while moving their hands as little as possible.

Unfortunately, the StarFighter has soldered memory, which is one of the main drawbacks of new ThinkPad models. Star Labs also sells the mid-range StarBook laptop with replaceable memory and the low-end StarLite laptop with soldered memory. On the other hand, Star Labs is Linux-first and pays the developers of the pre-installed Linux distribution configured in the order, which is an advantage over Lenovo for Linux users.


As Billy Tallis from anandtech explains, soldered memory has its advantages too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760461


Not joking at all, I hope. The trackpoint is very convenient: you don't have to move your hands off the home row just to move mouse pointer.


Good luck defending against Xur and the Kodan armada without 128GB of RAM. Sounds like Centauri sold you on another one of his Excalibur tricks.


Can you explain, I don't understand your comment at all.


It's a reference to an 80s movie called "The Last Starfighter" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/


Is this a chatgpt response. What do these words even mean


I was confused as well. I looked it up and apparently it's a reference to The Last Starfighter movie.


Don't trust the posts above! These were written by spies from Rylos! Once we smash the Frontier we will be able to rid ourselves of the Star League!


Centauri! Is that you? It's been a while.


Down voted for not knowing the film inside out, great.


Downvoted for bringing up chatgpt out of nowhere as part of a complaint.


For sure. People really need to stop complaining about the obscurity of things they can Google. The first hit for "Xur and the Kodan armada" is a page from a fan wiki: https://thelaststarfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Xur

As somebody who plays very few video games and is forever looking up references, I promise that basically everything is now documented.


Wake me when they have shipped 10k units and I’m interested in buying the 10001th.

There seems to be a lot of wishful thinking involved in the lead time estimate.


Intel i3-1215U, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD, 4K display for €1.565,81, which is the cheapest that I could select feels a bit expensive...

A quick look on Geizhals[1], gives many alternatives, with better CPU and storage. The only thing that's probably different is the Linux aspect of the laptop.

[1]https://geizhals.eu/?cat=nb&xf=12_16384~2991_480~6752_Core+i...

But 240GB of storage... That's so little, even my phone (POCO X3 Pro) has 256GB and I paid around 220€ for the entire phone. For a computer 240GB just feels almost unusably small, unless if you're running ChromeOS, but that's something completely different.


Those are all windows computers.


Yeah I was looking at those specs, and these seems very overpriced no?

If you spec a Tuxedo Aura 15 Gen2 (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Notebooks/...) to the same level (not sure what the equivalent to the CPU is for Ryzen though), and although the display isn't 4K its still much less (just over 700, so around half the price...). There are nice features that the StarFighter has than the Aura 15 Gen2 doesn't, but are those features worth basically 2x the price..?


While the StarFighter is a much more expensive product, I think the argument would be that it's fairly unique, arguably the highest end Ryzen 6000 developer laptop that an end-user can order globally (but not get delivered, sadly) atm. Comparing the Aura 15 Gen 2:

* One of the biggest spec differences is that the Aura uses a Zen2 based 5700U (Lucienne) vs the StarFighter's Zen3+ based 6800H (Rembrandt) so expect a +50% performance difference on MT workloads: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4156vs4749/AMD-Ryzen-7-...

* iGPU is also a big improvement. The 6800H's GPU is about 70% faster on synthetic and 90% faster on gaming benchmarks: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Vega-8-vs-Radeon-680M_10313_11... - it also has a newer VCN engine that supports AV1 decoding among other things

* The Aura has USB3 vs the Starfighter w/ USB4 (again, thanks to the new Ryzen generation), which will give you 40Gbps transfer rates, support for eGPU enclosures, etc

* Better display panels can be hundreds of dollars more expensive (here's a discussion of a $250 price gap for upgrading to a 4K panel from a few years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/XMG_gg/comments/izg598/no_4koled_pa...) - a 600nit vs 300nit display btw, is a world of difference

* 49Wh vs 85Wh battery is a 73% bigger capacity battery. At an equivalent power usage, that'd be the difference between 7h vs 12h of light usage for example and IMO isn't something to scoff at.

* Due I expect primarily due to it's Mg alloy chassis, the Starfighter is actually 250g lighter - 1.4kg vs 1.65kg, which is actually quite impressive for its size and battery capacity. The pogo-pin/removable webcam leads to a sleeker and compact frame that probably helps in shaving off size/weight even if you don't care about the privacy aspect

* While I prefer replaceable SO-DIMMs on my laptops, the Starfighter at least lets you configure w/ 64GB of LPDDR5 so you get the better power efficiency, performance, and weight savings w/o sacrificing upgradability (64GB is the max the Ryzen 6000 platform supports)

* coreboot option vs AMI BIOS - to me this is more of a neat nice to have, but I understand the sort of development commitment/investment in the future this thing is. Here's a discussion on Coreboot for Framework from their forums: https://community.frame.work/t/coreboot-on-the-framework-lap...

* Having been using a Framework w/ a fingerprint sensor that works in Linux for the past half year+ now, I will admit that it's hard to go back to something that doesn't have this, and I'd pay a fair amount extra for this...

Anyway, while you do pay a hefty premium for maxing out the specs (more than the cost of each individual improvement), it actually seems not so egregious when I add it ll up, if only because it seems like no one else is doing it. Of course, this calculus I think changes if delivery gets delayed and/if someone were to release a high-end Ryzen 7040 Linux-friendly laptop (Zen4, RNDA3, Xilinx AI accelerator) before then.

BTW, I think that the Tuxedo Infinity Book Pro 14/16 Gen7 (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-InfinityBook-Pro-1... and https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-InfinityBook-Pro-1...), while Intel-based (12700H), with a bigger battery, better display, better IO, and lighter chassis than the Aura is much more competitive with the StarFighter. Sadly the IBPs don't have a US ANSI keyboard layout...


Do you know where there's any hard data on the actual speed of AMD's USB4 implementation in the 6xxx series? Everywhere I've looked, I get "USB4" then a blurb that USB4 can be "up to 40Gb/s" with the more honest stating that only 20Gb/s is actually required to meet the spec requirements.

What does AMD actually implement?

While we're on the topic, why is there basically no public information about Socket FP7 or it's chipset? Nothing on FP7r2 or FP8 either (by the way, upcoming 7xxx mobile chips support all three of these with likely different levels of motherboard capabilities). Why is there not much public for mobile AMD chipsets newer than a decade ago?


I haven't seen benchmarks, but my understanding is to officially claim USB4 support with Windows, 40Gbps and PCIe tunneling support are both required. This PC World article has some real world testing w/ a Ryzen 6000 laptop: https://www.pcworld.com/article/703578/usb4-support-amd-ryze...

I'm sure you can get a BSP contract w/ AMD to get implementation details (or simply have a relationship with a board design partner, but I'm not really sure why there would be an expectation for public information on something that's not really relevant to the general public).


Crap, I am in the market for laptop now. I can stomach 4-5months waiting time

Meanwhile lots of brands are spitting 15"+ laptops with FHD dispalys like it is 2010s. eWaste :(


$800 for 2 extra warranty years? Uhhhhhhhhh.


And about half that for the afaik EU minimum legal warranty of 2 years. Their warranty page says they'll honor local laws, though, which I expect to mean whatever flag is displayed at the bottom of the page for you as opposed to their local.

They probably won't be pleased to learn that the Netherlands, which they seem to have a custom page for so apparently support, doesn't have a minimum duration specified, so you could take them to court if the CPU fails after 5 years since who's ever heard of a CPU failing? Those things usually last decades and so that's what one is also lead to expect if not otherwise advertised. (I don't know of case law in this area, but that's how I've heard consumer law being explained by the consumer market authority consuwijzer and others.)

"1 year limited warranty" for a 2000€ device that usually lasts at least 3, if not 5 years. Do people in the UK commonly put up with that or is the 1 year thing due to their small scale?


UK law is not straight forward since it uses the word "reasonable" in the duration.

"The Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that items must be of satisfactory quality, as described, fit for purpose and last a reasonable length of time. You have these rights for six years in England and Wales or five years in Scotland.

Items must be of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose as described and last a reasonable length of time. So, for example, if you have bought a washing machine and it breaks after two years you should still be able to claim. However a consumer is expected to use the appliance reasonably. For example, a washing machine may be expected to be used a few times a week. It will show if it has been used every day twice a day for two years and this may be considered unreasonable and you would not get a repair or replacement.

For an item such as a washing machine, or a car etc., the retailer can take off money for use. This needs to be a reasonable “amount”.

You should familiarise yourself with the Consumer Rights Act 2015 before paying for any warranty being offered.

It is worth stating I have never paid for or used a warranty. I always assert my legal rights.

A retailer may try and fob you off saying that you should have bought a warranty. But your consumer rights are worth more than any warranty."

https://thecomplainingcow.co.uk/what-is-a-warranty-what-is-a...


This isn't a regular warranty. As the website states: "Our 1-year limited warranty allows you to take your computer apart, replace parts, install an upgrade, and use any operating system and even your firmware, all without voiding the warranty."

These actions would normally void the warranty on most laptops.


> Our 1-year limited warranty allows you to take your computer apart, replace parts

The whole point of a warranty is to save me from needing to do those things.

> install an upgrade

Nearly everything inside is either non-upgradeable, pointless to upgrade, or doesn't void other manufacturers warranties (lenovo does not void warranty for replacing ssd) so that's completely meaningless.


Yeah, the equivalent additional coverage for a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 is $111. And that's for their onsite repair, where they come to you. It seems like StarFighter has very low confidence in the longevity of their products. Which would be a dealbreaker for me.


Sorry but I can't take seriously a company who states 'that sets a new standard for privacy' and their web page is full of trackers.

That shows to me they don't believe in what they're preaching.


I laughed when I read this

> Media keys for playback, volume, brightness, screenshots and more

and realized they're the usual function keys doubly purposed.

Do you even need to mention it as a feature?


> Do you even need to mention it as a feature?

It wasn't, untill Apple intoduced the Macbook Pro with touchbar. Luckily Apple has finally accepted that people don't want it, and is no longer forcing it upon its customers.


Back in the old DDR4 people used to say extremely high frequency ram (lets says above 3600MHz), that normally was O.C'd, would make your system unstable.

Any one knows if it still happens in these DDR5 days?

I'm asking because 6400MHz seems ludicrously high for a guy like me that just last week got some good old 2400MHz sticks for my home server and I'm wondering if it isn't marketing just to show high numbers.


The speeds officially supported by a CPU's memory controller tend to lag behind the speeds officially supported by the fastest available memory modules. This gap got pretty wide toward the end of the DDR4 era: Intel's current CPUs that support both DDR4 and DDR5 only officially support DDR4 speeds up to 3200MT/s, but there's little reason to equip a desktop with slower than 3600MT/s memory given the state of the DDR4 market.

6400 MT/s is similarly beyond the fastest officially supported DDR5 speeds for CPUs. But the fine print reveals that this machine is actually using soldered LPDDR5, which is officially supported at 6400MT/s or higher by pretty much every processor or SoC that uses LPDDR5(x). Ditching the DIMM slots really does make it easier to operate the memory bus at higher speeds.

Star Labs needs to correct their site to not refer to LPDDR5 as DDR5, because they really are different types of memory and only one of them is upgradable by the end user.


The actual ram internally doesn't clock that fast, and many in fact run at the same rate as in the ddr4 days. The interface tackes the high rate down to a much lower rate but with more data flowing in parallel. But the ratio is locked, so if you overclock, the ram rate has to go up too, which is most likely what makes it unstable.

So the upshot is that if this 6400Mhz device is not overclocked, it shouldn't be unstable.


It's far worse than you make it out to be.

Max internal clocks on DDR4/5 are about 400MHz. There's a fundamental limit (rapidly diminishing return) to how fast you can drain and charge capacitors.

They try to make up for it by reading/sending entire row(s) at one time and sending quickly over the wire, but that's clearly reliant on cache line optimization of the program and doesn't do much to improve real-world latencies.


This is correct. I don't see how you think I was "making it out" to be better- nothing you added is inconsistent with what I wrote.


I don't have an answer to your primary question, but I can say that latency has gone up dramatically as speed has increased. I remember back in the original DDR days, CAS 2 was the stuff to get. Now, we see CAS latencies in the 30s and even 40(+?)!


Latency, as in time spent, has not really changed.

Memory numbers are just dumb.

CL32 at 6400MHz (3200MHz doubled) is 10 nanoseconds.

CL2 at 266MHz (133MHz doubled) is 15 nanoseconds.


18 hrs battery life with an Intel processor would be great but seems unrealistic


> removable webcam

Mmhm... Having owned a couple "linux first" laptops now, the cynic in me is saying that they are trying to flip a design limitation into a strength. They wanted slim bezels and to maximize screen real estate. They can't afford to do a notch like apple to get there. The solution? Make the webcam a peripheral and sell it as a privacy boon.


TBH it's not a bad idea. Integrated webcams are crap anyway.


I'm glad they're not doing a notch because those are awful. Not sure about this approach either, though.


If this laptop is real deal, for me, it will be really hard decision which one to buy; StarFighter or Framework.


Practically as upgradable and maintainable/repairable as the framework. They sell all of the components separately, and this runs a fully up-to-date coreboot and even esoteric linux systems get tested on it. It is a significantly better Linux computer.


The StarFighter has soldered memory, making it significantly less upgradeable than the Framework Laptop. (Star Labs also sells the mid-range StarBook with upgradeable memory.) The Framework Laptop also has the advantage of swappable port/storage modules. However, the StarFighter has higher specs than the Framework Laptop at a higher price, and Star Labs is Linux-first while Framework is Windows-first.


If you went for the 64GB option, there wouldn't be any RAM upgrade possible. Although that's very pricy.


Well, it might be a better Linux computer when it ships. The StarBook Mk VI ran about 6 months behind schedule (pre-orders are still shipping now: https://support.starlabs.systems/status/f38fed83-e6a1-454c-8...) though so I wouldn't set your watch to it...


Framework doesn’t have matte display nor AMD CPUs.


Too bad it's only available as a 16 inch option. I'd be all over it if there was a 13/14.


They have a 14-inch model; it's called Starbook.


Cannot see if the 64GB option has ECC. That would be a nice feature for such a big chunk of memory.


64GB of soldered 6400MHz LPDDR5, with ECC? Nope, I don't think so.


Which is sad for me. I really do appreciate ECC on "big" memory (> 32GB) machines.


All the Linux-y/FOSS-y things are great. I wish my laptop had Coreboot. Luckily you can switch the keyboard to ANSI too.

The biggest flaws are this is the tail-end of these CPUs being current gen with the newer chips already announced & the display panel only covers sRGB in a world that's been transitioning to DCI-P3. With the former, it's a shame smaller ODMs & OEMs can't get access to the latest chips like the bigger players. With latter, I just don't know—we have the tech and the eyeballs to perceive more colors but most laptops still aren't embracing it even if phones have latterly moved to wider gamut (which makes using them for content creation subpar).


Kudos to them for not including an accountant numpad.


Why did they feel the need to move the backslash key?


That's the UK layout -- if you go to customize it and select the US one, it's where you'd expect it to be.


Now imagine having to hold Shift to type numbers.

AZERTY is a crime against humanity.


You're looking at the UK keyboard. For some reason they have it next to the left shift.


I live in the UK and can’t stand that crackpot layout that thinks the paragraph mark and the negation sign trump bacquote and tilde, so I buy my laptops from the US, except for Apple who allow you to choose your keyboard layout as an option.


We like it there


This is why my country declared its independence.


Independence Day.

4th of Ju\y


FINALLY a linux-focused powerhouse laptop with a decent screen. PC laptop screens seem to be stuck in the early 2000s.

And only a short while after the M1/M2 are out and Asahi got GPU acceleration working. :D

Intel was so close.

(It also maxes out at 4TB of flash; the MBP can be configured with 8.)


If they can deliver and be alive this time next year I'm ordering one.


Product description sounds like Luke Skywalker's description of Princess Leia's rescue reward to Han Solo. "More then you can imagine."

To which Han replies, "I can imagine quite a lot."


Considering these two processors:

    Intel® Core® i9-12900H (2.50GHz 14-core / Turbo Boost up to 5.00GHz)
and

    AMD Ryzen™ 7 (3.20GHz 8-core 6800H / Boost clock up to 4.70GHz)
Would the Ryzen actually be faster on average on single-core workloads since it's base spec is 3.20GHz vs the intel's base spec 2.50GHZ? (Not sure how long single core's can Boost for)

Or does the Intel outperform the Ryzen pretty much unilaterally?


Simply looking at the clock rate has never been the most useful metric when comparing CPUs.

Even back in the day a 33 MHz 486 DX was much faster than a 33 MHz 386 DX.

It’s better to look at benchmarks. Passmark is a good one. Its headline number is good for comparing performance in software that takes advantage of multiple cores. For that reason they also show single core performance to see how a cpu will performance relatively using games and apps that don’t use multiple cores.

Benchmarks for both chips:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-12900...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+6800H&i...

In this case the Intel chip beats the AMD chip both in multi-core and single-core benchmarks.


Depends somewhat on workload. Generally the 12900H wins but there are some loads (e.g. handbrake) where the 6800H wins: https://www.techspot.com/review/2487-amd-ryzen-6800h/


Golden Cove is a much wider core than Zen 3 and has decently higher IPC. I'd guess Zen 3 is faster at base clocks, but I believe the 12900H doesn't stay at base clocks very often.


In general, how far removed is a coreboot computer from a fully open-hardware computer? Is there any promise that the latter will be available at some point?


Almost a 1000$ extra to get a decent CPU? Unless I'm missing something a 1.02 GHz i3 seems underpowered for a 2000$ plus machine.


I’m the market for a new laptop - considering MacBook Pro m2, but also looking at Linux alts. What’s the suggested options these days?


We running up on the next generation of laptops soon. I got a Lenovo Z13 and it's been pretty good. The performance is there, having hiDPI without 4K meant I wasn't needlessly wasting power. It offered 32 GB of RAM (with DDR5 making it higher bandwidth). The display upgrade covers 100% DCI-P3 for color work with decent accuracy out of the box. The integration with fwupd has been awesome—something I had yet to experience in the couple of laptops I ran through.

My biggest gripe: I wish it came with 1 USB-A (maybe a micro SD slot).


I picked up a Dev One and am very happy with it and its Linux support. If you can't find one, it's just a rebranded Elitebook 845 G8.

Otherwise, System76/Clevo are the usual recommendations, along with certain Thinkpad models.

Here's what r/linuxhardware recommends: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1073j9f/reco...


Is there a point to having a 165Hz display with no dGPU? Unless you're really addicted to high-framerate Minecraft or something.


High frequencies reduce eyestrain.

Source: someone who suffered through the CRT years.


“A keyboard that's pure function.” But neither the cursor up/down keys nor the top row are full height.


Also, function keys aren't separated into 4-key blocks, and ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdown are in the wrong place. :-(


I’d love to know about a good laptop for Linux that has 32gb RAM and a decent amount of IO and a decent keyboard.


Last year I made a list of options when I was looking: https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...


The HP DevOne goes up to 64GB. Terrible screen, however.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16189462


HP DevOne is all sold out: https://hpdevone.com/


HP made the only laptop I ever bought that literally fried itself. Anecdotal and all that, but they're dead to me.


This looks amazing! My next laptop will definitely be from them. They also ship with ZorinOS, perfect match!


I love the fact that there is no discrete gpu.

I don’t run games and proprietary drivers are more hassle than anything else.


>To this day, we still haven't found a competitors laptop that performs faster with the same hardware.

I am quite curious how on earth "a laptop specially made for linux" will enable to have more performance on same hardware? More thermal pipe or you write your own drive?


most features listed will add tons and tons to the price of the thing.... terrible way of marketing something. list of good stuff 1600 euro price to lure u, but if you select the specs listed via the configurator you get up to double that price easily...


I have a weird feeling these guys are the scammers of slide n joy, the dual screen addition to laptops where they siphoned off money of buys for years, started with a Kickstarter.

Really hope these guys get investigated. From Belgium or French they were.


Tteir laptops are great and i own one.


Isn't the idea of this pitch that they're going to design their own laptops now though?

I was under the impression that the extant laptops from this brand are just rebadges (Clevo - like System76).

It's a big leap from slapping custom badges and boot logos on a Clevo to designing something from scratch.


No they’ve been designing in house for years, this is just their latest.


Apologies then! Still hope the slide n joy guys will get justice tho


Why would I buy this instead of a Tuxedo or Slimbook?

I don't mind paying more for a laptop from an independent company with linux support, but the price is excessive and I don't even know if what I'm buying is actually good.


They design their hardware in-house and their support is very good


I wish they would show actual photos of the thing or a video instead of renders.


Everyone complaining about the soldered memory please show me a lpddr5 dimm.


Please let this be real.


Very, very nice.

Weight is 1.4 kg so a tad heavy (my 17" LG gram is 1.3kg)

If it had an NVidia GPU, it'd be perfect for my purpose.

[EDIT]: argh, I take it back: no numpad, so can't use Blender seriously on it.


I am loving the number of linux laptops coming out. And I like that this company has an option starting at £400.

All we need is for schools or governments to buy in and we can kill windows


Lol, no. Hardware support is only a piece of the puzzle, arguably the first one. Then you have to find suitable, well-performing replacements for every software being used, from generic to specific to custom LOB.


There's a bug on the site where if you select a different amount of RAM, the price doesn't update and when you check your basket it still says 16GB RAM.


Does anyone have an idea what the profit margins on devices like that are? I still find it hard to believe that a laptop should cost north of $1000.


I still find it hard to believe that such a device can be less that $1000, considering how many parts have to be designed, how many cutting edge components there are in there, the depth of the supply chain and the manufacturing quality. Modern manufacturing is insane.

Probably the most complex single device humans can make is a CPU die and you can have a mid-range one for the price of a meal, and this consumer laptop presumably has manufacturing tolerances that would make the people who built spacecraft a few decades ago sweat.


> you can have a mid-range one for the price of a meal

Is that an expensive meal or a cheap CPU? A meal for a family?

My mental model for a mid-range CPU is an i3 (don't forget Pentium / Celeron), and even for those Intel recommends charging $109-119 for the i3-13100F (they had a similar range for the i3-10105F). Even if you go all the way back to the first generation of Intel Core cpus, the i3-530 had a recommended price of $117.

Even if you're buying used + several generations old off eBay, you're still probably paying at least $50. And, note that once you're looking at several generations old hardware, you're really not looking at a mid-range device anymore -- The i3-13100F scores nearly twice as high on PassMark as the i3-10100F, for instance, and higher than the i7-9700F.

It's still orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than anything from the 80s, certainly, but new hardware is not _that_ cheap.

Also, that said, I remember when the Macbook Air first launched -- I know some people who ran the numbers and were impressed they could fit that SSD + RAM + CPU + display + battery in that price envelope.


> Is that an expensive meal or a cheap CPU?

I don't know how things in Deep America are, but since Herr Putin started his little anschluss, a meal for two in a nice European restaurant can easily run in the 3-digits. And I'm talking nice, not Michelin-nice - for those you'll need 3 digits for each person.


Honestly as a business customer I can’t justify buying this unless there is an option to unbrand it.

(Actually if you had a unbranding option we could sticker it with our own company logo and that could be pretty cool)

Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile business meeting with an obviously random and non-corporate laptop (oh that looks like some random cheap overseas brand, uhh ok, are you sure you can afford us)?


What a strange set of considerations so bizarre they apply to like no one but you. Good thing that is the case and this logic applies to a dwindling number of professionals. I understand how people can judge on such minor things but on that front, might as well not hire any black people or women on your team lest you heighten your customers' subconcious biases.

edit: also, would a linux laptop work for you? Wouldn't you need office or such?


VDI scenario is common now for engineers, so yes it would work to virt into a windows box, but yes there are other friction points such as compact issues with PowerPoint for meetings, and you probably wouldn’t run a PowerPoint over a virt.

It could also take a lot of messing around to get Office 365 MDM working with Linux. I think you'd want to do a Linux desktop deploy and sort out these issues before you tried to deploy [any of these brands of] Linux laptops.


> What a strange set of considerations so bizarre they apply to like no one but you

Oh, sweet non-corporate bullshit child.

People get shown the door for just having non-Apple devices with them.


> People get shown the door for just having non-Apple devices with them.

Is this a thing that you've actually personally seen happen? Because I've seen and heard of some fairly messed up companies and that strains credulity. Like, I suppose it happens, because there are enough companies that everything happens, but that feels like the 99th percentile of insane company cultures.


> Is this a thing that you've actually personally seen happen

Yes, I saw situations where the things which were not conforming to the status led to... or more like didn't led anywhere.

Also, two things:

1. There are people who scoff off at green bubbles.

2. "It has doors that open like this"

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://media.tenor.com/9GE7Vhf9MAEAAAAd/silicon-siliconvall...


I doubt he can name a company that does this.


Tuxedo offers unbranded and individual Logos, like Schenker. Intel Management Engine, Webcam & Audio (on Intel CPUs), and WLAN & Bluetooth can be deactivated directly via the BIOS. Can be ordered without SSD, RAM is upgradable. Just a content customer.

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...


This is neat, thanks!


Is your company so hardwired to Dell and Lenovo that they can't understand competitors exist?


Several people on HN lauded Lenovos' same-day-service warranty. Downtime costs a lot of money.


Because normally you buy from Lenovo, HP or Dell for the warranty, support and driverpacks for SCCM etc.

Real companies have IT provision laptops for employees.

If you are consultant remote, sure just Citrix into the envroment. But if your laptop breaks its on you.


Buying anything outside the Dell or Lenovo business ecosystem really puts your head on the chopping block to be announced a crazy person the minute some business critical function (like dual monitors through dock) doesn’t work…


You need to find a better company with a better corporate culture.


Those are in much shorter supply than you seem to imply.


I've never previously encountered one so perverse that choice of laptop is basically tantamount to a fashion choice and causes ridicule.


> Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile business meeting with an obviously random and non-corporate laptop (oh that looks like some random cheap overseas brand, uhh ok, are you sure you can afford us)?

So your proposed solution is to... remove all branding? How does that help anything?


I think that building custom no-brand desktops is a pretty acceptable cost cutting measure taken by some companies, so you could pitch it something like “we’re working with a company to build custom laptops exactly for what we need”, or if someone asks about it you can explain it ala “yes, we couldn’t get exactly what we needed so we build a completely custom fleet of laptops”.

Or ideal scenario, with a brand delete you slap a [company] sticker on it and nobody really notices that it’s not a Dell Latitude running Linux.


So you’d rather lie to them than to have a laptop from a company they may not know about?


Okay and what if you buy 20-50 of these in bulk.

Do they have on-site support like HP,Dell or Lenovo?


That might be an argument for desktops, but we're talking about a laptop.


Any suggestions how you’d sell something like this? Brand delete is all I have.


Unbranded laptops are something I'd also prefer, even though the corporate environment you're describing is very employee-hostile when it comes to technology choice. (Sorry about your situation.)

I know that Schenker sells some of their laptops with their logo on the laptop lid by default and offers a choice to remove the logo for an additional charge. Example (VIA 15 Pro): https://bestware.com/en/schenker-via-15-pro-m22.html

This option is possible because the laptop is a branded version of an ODM laptop (Tongfang PF5NU1G).


Yea random alixpress brand laptop. Sounds good lmao


Schenker is a German company. Like with all branded versions of ODM laptops (such as models from Tongfang and Clevo), customer support for Schenker laptops is handled by Schenker and not the ODM.


HP sells more laptops than Dell.


I don't think MBAs are the market they're targeting. Unfortunately, an MBA is often the one who'll have to sign off on the expense.


My uni friend is a CTO in large consultancy. He attended meetings with Razer laptop.

You've got it wrong.

Yes, I imagine some prehistoric corporations might have a problem with non corpo laptop.

Luckily the rest of the world has moved on.


Doesnt have GPU to run machine learning?


Lenovo Legion 5 pro has 4k matte display, RTX 3070 8Gb, AMD Ryzen and is fully compatible with Linux (I am running CUDA on PopOS).


Lenovo Legion 5 pro has 4k matte display, RTX 3070 8Gb and is fully compatible with Linux (I am running CUDA on PopOS).


RYF certification or no sale for me.


I love the idea of this but don't understand how they couldn't fit numpad on there.


Pretty cool especially with Ryzen CPU option. Does it support USB 4 with Ryzen too?


In September they said the Ryzen versions wouldn't have USB4 support [1] but in November they said it would. If it's important for you it might be best to contact their support to confirm which it is.

[1] https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/status/1574860315254263830

[2] https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/status/1593525807682568192


I need an LTT review on this.


Linus has been very upfront about investing in Framework, so I am not suggesting he is doing anything untoward, but I still assume there is some unconscious biased in his organisations reviews of competing laptops.


No, we need a notebookcheck.net review instead. LTT doesn't know anything about Linux anyway.


Write them or LTT about, maybe you'll get one.


Really wish someone would make a laptop with a 2.5” U.2 slot instead of M.2.


Key column to the right of the enter key, that's a nope for me.


If it still has Intel ME, this is all simply marketing.


Comes with ME disabled by default. Really unique offering.


What’s the AMD equivalent?



Looking forward to QubesOS compatibility report :)


+150€ to change the keyboard layout?

That's surprising!


Missing discrete GPU and ECC RAM.


lol…why would anyone buy this? It is more overpriced than an apple m2 machine.


Real Linux support. Using hardware that's half supported gets old once you're relying on Linux 100% to get your work done. I'll pay a premium, and have, for the assurance that the entire package works well with Linux.

Also, look at how expensive M2 MBPs are. Spec one out to a comparable laptop in the OP and the MBP will be more expensive.


> It is more overpriced than an apple m2 machine

Is it?

The 16" M2 starts at €3049 and maxed out it is well over €6000.

The 16" Starfighter starts at €1553 and maxed out it is ~€3500.


To support Linux-friendly hardware? For many people extra $1000 here or there doesn’t matter.


Not sure how exactly 16 inch 4K display is Linux friendly knowing that Xorg and Wayland still has plenty of UI scaling issues. And the fact that they expect you to power it with Pentium N5030 processor is laughable. Why even offer such combination?

Also it's funny how on landing page it mentions 165Hz display, but in specs it is only available as an option and not for the 4K display. Not that it would even be able to drive it properly.

Looking at the specs, it seems like they are trying to build one of the worst possible Linux experiences possible. It lacks only Nvidia GPU to make it absolute garbage. I have one like that at work. Thinkpad with 4K display, and dedicated Nvidia GPU. It's not supposed to run Linux but I tried it anyway and it was very bad.


Scaling on Wayland on popular DEs has been a relatively solved problem for at least a year or two now. Fractional scaling, and scaling in general, used to be a pain I ran into often, but I've hadn't had to think about it at all in quite a while since it just works. Might still be an issue on older LTS distributions, though.

edit: I looked back at some release notes and it's been more than 2 years that fractional scaling worked. The pandemic has really messed with my sense of time for the last few years.

> And the fact that they expect you to power it with Pentium N5030 processor is laughable. Why even offer such combination?

I wouldn't choose it, but it has a <5W TDP according to the specs, might be a good choice if you're just doing glorified texting/programming and want long battery life.

Also, I don't see an option for a Pentium N5030 in the laptop in the OP.


I have Lenovo 14" with 4k display and Ryzen 4850. I really like the crisp and accurate display. I have used wayland since 2015 when it became default in Fedora. I'm not sure what you mean when you refer to scaling issues? And even Skylake iGPU was fast enough to drive the 15" 4k display 60Hz on Precision 5510 laptop smoothly in desktop use. Ryzen is obviously many times faster so there should be enough power for higher refresh rates.


Fractional scaling was initially an afterthought for Wayland and its implementations, like in Plasma, lagged about adding it and then implementing it without bugs. Fractional scaling was broken on Plasma for a bit because of it, and GNOME decided that users didn't need it. That hasn't been the case for a while, now, and it works on both desktops.

Xorg also had to implement it, and at one point Xorg's implementation was more stable than what popular Wayland compositors offered.


I am running Linux on my Lenovo gaming laptop with 4k display and RTX 3070. I have no issues.


Good point and all but shit is still too pricey.


This machine looks amazing! We now need a nix configuration for it! Congratulations on the launch


Does it run Windows? :-)


They offer Windows as a configuration option, so yes.


Who is this targeting besides the 100 or so hackernews commenters who will actually go through and buy it. Why would I buy this over a lenovo for instance.

Okay so privacy nuts who think that removing their webcam and microphone protects from the perceived spyware that is next to them on their desk in the form of an iPhone.

I see nothing good about this. Inexperienced company, inexperienced in manufacturing and hardware design.


It’s one of the only laptops that ship with core boot, Fully up-to-date with upstream commits to work flawlessly with their hardware. Their support has been extremely helpful, and the build quality is amazing. Fully custom hardware, which is extremely rare for Linux computers. I am just a happy customer, no other affiliation.


Where are you buying laptops (your grandma’s acer doesn’t count but even so…) where it does that “flawlessly” work with its hardware?

Just becoming a fetish at this point.


Sadly, when it comes to Linux compatibility on laptops, "flawless" hardware compatibility is still an extremely rare exception (and even pre-installed and Linux certified laptop models like Dell XPS DE, or Lenovo ThinkPads can have long-standing issues).


> Okay so privacy nuts who think that removing their webcam and microphone protects from the perceived spyware that is next to them on their desk in the form of an iPhone.

Not sure about your work, but in my field pretty much every person I know who works in industry has their camera taped over. I believe for lots of them this is actually company policy.


Partial agree on the privacy thing. It does make me feel better not to have an eye always pointed towards me no matter what I'm doing, so I do see value in being able to disable it physically. However, being paranoid enough to want to physically remove the webcam is an entirely different ball game than having a webcam cover and silently doing your thing, so I assume that everyone agrees that this is just a marketing gimmick. For the mic, I can see the argument that putting your phone away is easier than not having any sort of modern computing device around when you want to not be recorded, and so that could be useful for some people (but I agree: a very limited number). You might also consider that people currently don't take these privacy steps because it's inconvenient. If it were as easy as flipping a switch, maybe people would use it after all. Having the option isn't bad.

> Why would I buy this over a lenovo for instance.

Lenovo tells you to install Windows when there is any doubt that it's a software issue, and of course that's an easy doubt to cast. There is no support tier that will support Linux, let alone coreboot. Want to apply firmware updates? Again, get yourself a Microsoft license. At least, that's what I hear from colleagues, I don't have a Lenovo currently.

Also, competition. I'm not sure how many other modern laptops still have 5 USB ports, especially when considering the large 85 Wh battery and the gimmicky screen you get (in case anyone cares about >60 Hz or 4k at 16"). It does seem like a rare combo and not a bad one.


actually agree. Also considering their "kill switch" marketing. Who needs to turn their internet off on a whim who doesn't already have some sort of keybind to do this? Why buy this over framework / other laptop for 25% more money. Don't really understand


My ThinkPad has a physical switch for airplane mode. There's a big difference between "turning off" the functionality in software and physically cutting the power to anything that can transmit.


Is there though? Are you seriously so concerned about this a switch is what you require?


Because Framework is only available at, what seems to me like, tablet sizes. I know a lot of people love that size and that's fantastic, but I'm happy to see a ~15.6" option also being offered for those that prefer it.


If anything I wish framework had a laptop in the 11-12" range.


Isn't there a Samsung Tab in that size range? I seem to remember that being ten point something but it's been a few years


That's not a laptop.


Any keyboard that doesn't have a traditional T-shaped cursor keys layout is pure evil and should be banned.


I emailed System76 in 2013 asking them to accept Bitcoin. They said no, and continued to say no every couple of years when I emailed to ask again. Glad to see Starlabs is accepting crypto, but a little puzzled by there's no option for stablecoins like USDC. In any case, I'll take it.


I hope places continue to not accept Bitcoin. I can’t wait till it fades away.


Your expression of hostility to crypto is a good example of the sentiment System76 is catering to by not accepting it.

In any case, neither your opposition nor my fanboyism will determine crypto's long term success. Only its inherent utility will.




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