After almost seven years, I decided that the time for an upgrade is up! As a life-long Linux user, I spent some time looking for good alternative manufacturers of professional laptops that would be as Linux-friendly as possible. And I was happy to see that there are quite a few to choose from! But let me add some context first which will help clarify my preferences.
My preferences and previous experience
As a senior web developer working mostly in Ruby on Rails, I usually just edit text files and browse the web, nothing too demanding in terms of hardware power. I don’t even play games much (this might change now, actually 😅). That said, I hate being slowed down by a lagging computer, peripheral, operating system, program or whatever so since I could afford it I always looked for higher-end devices.
Although I usually work remotely from home, I've always opted for a laptop. That’s because when I do work outside, in the office or while commuting, I absolutely need to have the same setup as usually. I hate having to take care of maintaining and syncing multiple devices that I expect to just work. Over time, I fell in love with the convenience, lightness and beauty of ultra-portable laptops and the HiDPI displays that often come with them so am not looking elsewhere.
Previously, I used to have all sorts of laptops from various manufacturers, from some Hewlett-Packards, to a Fujitsu, to a Dell XPS 13 which was actually quite a nice device that I’ve used until now. (It had its quirks though and I got to replace almost everything I could in it, from the wifi module, to the motherboard or the palm rest assembly multiple times due to its notoriously loosening and breaking screw holders.)
All of them were running Linux, all having various problems with it, luckily less and less over time though, as Linux matured and manufacturers turned to cooperating with the kernel developers more often. After having used Red Hat, Ubuntu or Gentoo I jumped into the Arch Linux waters and never looked back. Generally, I like to tweak every aspect of the OS and the desktop environment so my full OS re-installs require a lot of effort and must not be needed more often than – essentially – when buying a new hardware…
So, overall, this time I was looking for a thin, ultra-portable, powerful laptop, with good display, that would be able to run Linux nicely. I didn’t care that much about multimedia peripherals quality, battery capacity or gaming power.
The Linux laptop market is finally a reality
At first I – very briefly – considered the standard laptop brands such as the latest Dell XPS 13 but always hated something essential about each and every one of them (such as having an awful keyboard with a touch bar, omg) or did not believe enough in the stated Linux compatibility.
I again realized how unhappy I was regarding the usual laptop market due to them still ignoring Linux. Fed up with paying thousands of bucks for a device running perhaps perfectly on Windows but being a pain in the arse to configure and/or use on Linux. Annoyed by binary drivers, quirks or having to pay for software licenses I wouldn’t use. What I wanted instead was a laptop that was carefully thought through specifically in terms of Linux compatibility and well tested under various distributions. A laptop, that would just work and work well.
And I was pleasantly surprised how many such companies there are in the market nowadays! There are some interesting brands, System76, Purism or the absolutely lovely concept of Framework laptops. I liked some of the devices but kept on searching because all of these brands were US-based and I wanted to prefer a European company, if possible.
Of course, there are a few of them, too! I particularly noticed Slimbook and TUXEDO Computers. After some more hesitation and reviews watching, I chose the TUXEDO (yes, it’s written in all-caps) InfinityBook Pro 14 (8th generation). I maxed-out most of the specs, fought the urge to add a custom logo and placed an order!
First checks and a Linux re-installation
The package came within two weeks. For the next few hours, I had the preinstalled TUXEDO OS booted up to check that all hardware is working nicely, including all function keys and even that little LED switch on the touchpad that allows to temporarily lock it.
All seemed OK so I wiped the disk and proceeded with Arch installation. That was straightforward, too, the only part I was fighting was the whole disk encryption (but I always do until I re-read the docs properly). So, soon after, I was running my favorite Linux distro with Gnome, Wayland, Firefox and everything else and could finally start comparing my impressions.
Things I like
I’ll try to keep this short while there are many things to like…
That beast is fast
This is the thing I noticed at the very first moment. It felt fast right after installation but at that time I thought maybe it’s just that it’s still basically empty but it stayed equally snappy after I loaded it with all my programs and data. Sure, it’s probably nowhere near the computing power of – say – the latest Apple “M” processors (well, in fact, it’s not that bad) but I’m not talking about benchmarks here but about the subjective feel of overall responsiveness during my usual workload.
At last I don’t mind if someone sends me a link to Slack, Miro, Figma, Notion or any other complex modern SPA web, as they open much, much faster than I was used to. I don’t mind doing this even during a Meet call (Meet being an infamous CPU eater) while having a ton of other programs open. Starting the Rails server for our not-so-little project is 40% faster for me than before which probably crossed some psychological perceptual boundary because subjectively it feels so much faster and not blocking me any more now.
During the couple of weeks that I have the TUXEDO now, I’ve never experienced any lag, sluggishness or hiccup, none that I’m aware of, at least. Contributing to this must be the 20 CPU threads and also the 64 gigabytes of RAM that I’m very happy to have added – the ”used memory“ chart rarely reaches 30% and I’ve yet to see it cross 50%. (Did I ditch the swap file? Of course I did!).
It just works
I know I’ve already said this but for me it’s such an essential point that I’ll shamelessly repeat: all hardware just works out of the box. The only thing I had to explicitly install driver for was that little LED switch on the touchpad that I mentioned earlier (and luckily Arch has a package for it so even that was a non issue). Everything else, from the WiFi to all graphics modes to sleep mode to Bluetooth to webcam or HDMI, it all just works. I didn’t bother with the infra-red camera though (the one that can be used for logging in), the OS seems to see it correctly but I had no interest yet.
I still can’t get fully used to this convenience. I haven’t had to solve any surprises after rebooting. All peripherals connected to the laptop via a USB-C docking station have so far worked seamlessly, too. Of course, maybe I was just lucky. Or maybe not, just compare the Arch wiki page for (an older) TUXEDO versus the new XPS…
It’s light
Compared to my old XPS 13, the TUXEDO feels noticeably lighter, although, interestingly, the weight is about the same in specs (ok, I weighted them both now and TUXEDO is 75g lighter). It’s so light that one of my colleagues thought that it has a plastic case (while it’s some magnesium alloy). It’s probably a bit less sturdy than my old Dell aluminum chassis but still solid enough for daily carrying over and I just love the lightness, I even sometimes forget that I have the laptop in my back pack…
The display is fine
The Dell display, with its extreme QHD resolution, set the bar really high and got me used to very sharp visuals and text. The TUXEDO display has a bit fewer pixels but you know what? Only horizontally. The vertical resolution is the same in both devices, which means that they both can show the same amount of text or code but text on the TUXEDO feels a bit larger as the display is taller. And I actually like that! I run my Gnome at 200% happily and after tweaking a few font sizes I reached a sweet spot. (Oh, actually I still use an extension to make the top Gnome panel a few pixels smaller but that’s just a touch up.)
What I also like about the display is that it’s anti-glare matte finish actually does the job. The brightness is fine too, sometimes I only miss that it can’t be turned a little bit further down. The 90Hz frequency is also nice especially when scrolling and animations feel so smooth.
The TUXEDO Control Center
I love how TUXEDO not only makes laptops but tries to take care of the whole experience. They have their own Linux distro that I don’t use but they also maintain a Control Center application that allows to monitor and configure various advanced aspects of the hardware. I use it to set the battery charging profile (in hope that it will last more than the ~3 years I was used to) or the power control profiles. Nice!
Things I like less…
There are certainly a few – rather minor – things that I dislike or am in the process of forced getting used to…
Keyboard issues
The first thing I noticed negatively about this laptop was the Delete key position: right next to the power button and – more importantly – not in the top right-hand corner of the keyboard any more. It felt wrong, even more when I was used to smashing ”that corner area“ with my finger and now had to re-learn my muscle memory to be more precise. The power button has a delay so, luckily, putting the laptop to sleep mode by accident never actually happened to me but I still hated the missed Delete key presses. Interestingly, I must have been successful at re-learning as this is not an issue for me any more, I now just vaguely remember how disturbing it was at the beginning.
What I still regret today is that I ordered a Czech keyboard layout for the notebook. I wanted to be able to see the top row of accented characters, yeah, this is nice, but I didn’t realize that all other special character keys are in such unusual positions and combinations that almost all non-alphanumeric key caps are misleading now. To clarify, I don’t use the Czech keyboard layout in my OS, I actually use a slightly customized Norman layout with the Czech characters added so that I can equally easily type Czech accents as well as all the special characters needed for programming.
I queried the TUXEDO support whether they could send me a few of the US layout key caps and to my surprise they offered me only replacing the whole keyboard. Which was kind of them but required sending the laptop back to their office and would not really solve my issue as I ideally want a fully customized layout. They said they had some bad experience with people damaging their keyboards while trying to shuffle keys on them which is funny because that was the first thing I did with the new laptop - I swapped the keys to match my layout and luckily it all works perfectly 😅. Anyway, this whole layout thing is not a TUXEDO issue but rather my own problem, I guess.
Touchpad issues
The touchpad is huge. It so big that I had to relearn where to put my left hand while typing or resting on the palm-rest assembly. Even so, I accidentally and unconsciously touched the pad several times, only to realize that my cursor moved somewhere I didn’t want and changed the currently focused app. I even unknowingly locked the touchpad a few times, nice that I got the LED working and now I can at least easily notice this situation. That said, I think I got used to this somehow as I don’t remember hitting this issue from a more recent past.
Another weird issue I have with the touchpad is that it seems to have problems with some of my fingers. When scrolling, I usually use fingers 3 and 4 (counting from the thumb) and on the new laptop this leads to some barely noticeable (but to me still sometimes disturbing) jerkiness in the scrolling. I have no idea what the root cause might be here: do I have the fingers too close to each other? is the conductivity of the skin on one of my fingers weird? Who knows. What I learned though is that when I use some other fingers, like 2 and 4 or 2 and 3, the problem goes away. And again, I must have forced my brain to do so as I don’t think I hit the issue any more. When writing this I even thought that the problem got resolved with some setting or update but no, it is still there if I try hard enough.
Fans and heat issues
Especially in the beginning when my senses regarding the laptop were alert and perception sharp could I notice the next issue: the fans are almost never totally calm. Not that I could usually hear them while being focused on working but when I turn the laptop upside down, yeah, they rotate, almost all the time. The TUXEDO monitoring app says the fans are usually at 20% of their max speed. I could probably manually move the trigger point for fans to start rotating a bit higher on the CPU heat curve but I have that in mind as a backup in case the problem bothers me more. Which it does not yet. I guess in general this is the high price for the enormous laptop power that we have to pay.
Another unexpected thing still surprises me time to time. There is heat coming out from behind the keyboard keys. It’s not a vague, fuzzy heat warming up the whole keyboard (that I experienced on my old Dell), it’s rather a focused ”blow“ of hot air attacking your fingers while the rest of the keyboard stays cool. It’s not an issue I struggle with often, but sometimes, especially when I rest my right thumb in the tiny area between the space bar and the touchpad, my brain triggers a ”too hot!“ alert and makes the finger move away before I realize it.
Coil whine etc
Yeah, it’s there but I only noticed it yesterday for the first time ever. It’s funny because my old Dell was very infamous for coil whine and here it is again. On the other hand, it’s much less of a problem on the TUXEDO laptop and it can only be noticed in extremely calm environment. The fact that I haven’t noticed it for several weeks makes it more than good enough for me.
I could also mention some things that might be relevant for other people, like a not particularly excellent quality of the webcam but you know what? I don’t care. It’s good enough for my needs and I have an external webcam at home anyway. So I’ll leave the rest of potential complaints to others. I am not aware of anything else that would bother me.
Conclusion
Should this still not be obvious from the above text, I love my new TUXEDO and hope that it will last for another seven years. It’s powerful as hell for my needs and it – almost boringly – just works in Linux. My productivity instantly jumped to unprecedented levels, the overall experience is very smooth, nothing gets in the way when I’m working with the applications that I need.
In a way this enhances a similar feel when programming in Ruby – I can make the program (or computer) do things in about the same pace as my intentions and thoughts come to my brain. I don’t have to wait till the interrupted flow is restored, I don’t struggle. And that is so nice and addictive. So thanks, TUXEDO!
Followup (spring 2024)
I started experiencing some random hard reboots, so I contacted the TUXEDO support and they recommended adding i915.enable_guc=2 to the kernel boot parameters, which indeed fixed the issue immediately and I'm happy again. :)
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