Tuxedo Pulse Gen 3
tuxedocomputers.com
tuxedocomputers.com
It's interesting to compare to the their Intel Infinity Book Pro Gen8 offering - that has a DDR5 SODIMMs, 99Wh battery, and is actually slightly lighter than the Pulse (also a brighter 400nit vs 300nit display), although you give up 1 M.2 SSD slot, it's 40% more expensive, and even with the much larger capacity runtime and performance is about the same or worse, since Intel.
Another good option for current-gen (7040) Ryzen ultra-portable Linux laptops is the Framework 13. A little pricier, 1 x M.2, but you get 2 x DDR5 SODIMMs, a 400nit+ display, and Framework has made good on their upgrade promises (this is their 4th drop-in replacement motherboard that runs in the same chassis and it seems like they're going to keep going). It has a very active Linux user community on their forums as well.
I am typing all the time in us alt international on various physical keyboards that have printed buttons in spanish qwerty, swiss french qwertz and plain ansi us keyboards. It is only a problem for those that have very little experience/use of the keyboard.
You'll always have your favorite physical layout but muscle memory can also adapt. The same way I don't ride my mountain bikes the same way I ride my road bikes I am naturally and unconsciously adapting to the different keyboards based on how they feel to my hands.
There’s definitely a bit of an adjustment period when I (re)introduce a keyboard into the rotation, but I can get back to proficiency within a day or two, and then I don’t notice it at all.
Sure if I get this laptop for free I may adapt. But for $1500, thank you!
Come on, button shape and placement (which is not that different, there is no round Caps Lock on Backspace) completely breaking the ability to work on the computer is the most retarded First World Problem.
Which car of yours did ever swap the positions and shapes of the 3 pedals or the steering wheel?
Every (manual) car I ever drove had left pedal always clutch, middle one brake, and right one was the loud pedal and steering wheel was always in front of me and somewhat round shaped.
So what's there to adapt to when changing cars? At least use some good analogies if you want to play this game.
>completely breaking the ability to work on the computer is the most retarded First World Problem
Where did I say it's completely breaking the ability to work on the computer?
It's not, but it's annoying enough to affect my productivity, kind of like a rock in my shoe, and enough for me to prefer to stick to my ISO layout wherever I can.
But you do you, and let me do me. Peace out.
Every time I go from the UK or Ireland to continental Europe. The entire set of controls are on the other side of the vehicle, and some are mirrored (e.g. gear shift on the left or the right) and some aren't (e.g. the layout of the pedals). So I adapt.
Every time I switch from a manual to an automatic or back.
Works for keyboards, too.
When I type on PCs, the leftmost or rightmost key is Ctrl, the one next to the spacebar is Windows/Super, and the one in between them as Alt.
When I type on a Mac keyboard, I use the one next to the spacebar as Alt, the leftmost/rightmost as Cmd, and the one in between as Ctrl.
The key switch feel tells me which I'm typing on.
Switching between US and ISO layouts is similar.
This is not that hard.
What do I win in exchange for getting accustomed to this?
Ask the shitheads placing PrtScr in the place of ContextMenu?
But this is irrelevant, TS states:
> I'm used to ANSI with single row Enter and I don't seem to be able to switch to ISO (in the past I was forced to order and replace keyboard in my laptop because of that
The size and form of the steering wheel, pedals and stick varies, yet they are located in the same place on a half-liter ultracompact and on a 5t lorry.
Since 90s I had used all the types of keyboards, with wildly different Enter-key shapes, with different "/" key placement, even with Escape being not the leftmost key. I used keyboards without any marks (and that wasn't Das Keyboard) and I used all the kinds of shitty keyboards (not including notebook ones). Aaaand I used all the notebook keyboards what some fuck decided to fuck with layout with absolutely no fucking reason. Oh, and let's not forget the greatest invention in 21st century: replacing the Function keys with whatever shitty function by default, because you reaaaaallly need to change the volume, monitor brightness, enable\disable wireless network and change the output to the external screen every couple of seconds, yes? Even the notebook in the topic has the power button where it should not be at all and which would actually break my muscle memory, because most sane notebook layouts have the Delete key there.
But I never ever had the trouble finding the Enter key on those keyboards. And I never had the trouble to actually adapt even to the shittiest keyboards. Well, except this PrtScr shit on the ThinkPads but even them.
Claiming a human being can't adapt to a slightly different form of the Enter key is like claiming what you can't drive the car because the steering wheel is slightly smaller than in your previous car.
The thread will argue it, and they are welcome to, but you want what you want. :)
I remember seeing this project years ago when I tried to reverse engineer my own laptop's fan control functions.
https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-control-center
I actually tried to make it work on my laptop back then. Didn't succeed unfortunately.
I'd really enjoy reading about how they figured out the power management and fan control stuff. I couldn't figure it out. Did they have to reverse engineer? As a manufacturer, do they have access to documentation? I emailed Clevo asking for documentation and they didn't send me anything helpful.
As the name wrongly imply, it is not just about controlling the keyboard. At least on my laptop (an aura15 gen 2), a whole chunk of the control center is not available when the module is not loaded. Not sure if it will help but you might want to look into this module as well for your investigation.
It's weird. There's all this Clevo ACPI/WMI stuff in those headers but when I dumped my laptop's DSDT tables there was nothing like that. I found some WMI code in there, ran them through a decompiler I found in a GitHub repository and just got back some empty stub code. I still feel disappointed about it.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DSDT
It's really cool that they added sysfs LED controls. I remember looking into that as well. I was planning to send USB LED driver to the kernel but while reading kernel dricer source code and mailing lists to learn how to do it I came across comments saying they prefer to keep stuff in user space whenever possible.
This is my driver in case anyone's interested:
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
I just remembered something else. They used to be on bitbucket instead of github. In 2018 I messaged them there.
https://bitbucket.org/tuxedocomputers/clevo-xsm-wmi/issues/4...
They asked me to email them. I did and they actually sent me the control center software before they released it and also some details about how they were interfacing with the laptop's embedded controller. I still have those emails, they were very helpful. Very nice company and people.
It's been a while since I was tempted to buy a laptop (granted I don't really look), but this configuration and price seems pretty great.
At a few months old, the laptop (a Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 6) couldn't hold a meeting.
Their customer service suggested I disabled the graphics card and to throttle the CPU, converting a $2000 laptop into a $1000 one spec-wise.
After a year and a half, I've just moved to a Thinkpad at half the cost and I couldn't be happier.
I wanted to support a smaller company rather than Lenovo but that's how it is, there where many other nuances I had to deal with (2 dead pixels, awful sound, microphone was meh, TuxedoOS started giving me kernel problems every update...).
At least now I know where to look for the next one, especially in Germany where it's annoyingly difficult to get a US QWERTY kb.
Spec wise this one is quite close to lenovo t14s/p14s gen 4, which can also be configured with a similar screen (there is also the yoga slim 7 gen 8, but it has a glossy screen).
As far as I can tell the trend was first started by the Mechrevo code 01. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-4000-mechrevo-la... Which actually got a decent amount of press have some initial Twitter hype. Several other Clevo based brands followed like Tuxedo and XMG. Not sure that Clevo actually intended it as a dev focused config originally, but they definitely leaned into it with later revisions after they saw the enthusiasm.
Not for everyone, personally the Framework 16 appeals a lot more to me (I've preorded), but when I was in college the pure CPU maximization probably would have won me over.
Historically, a lot of devs using Linux laptops have preferred iGPU models both to maximize useful perf/watt (dGPUs models tended to drain power much faster even when idle) and b/c most dGPU laptops are Nvidia-based and the driver issues used to be terrible. I wonder if that calculus will be changing now w/ local LLM code-helpers and other AI apps benefit greatly from stronger GPUs.
JavaScript would be a strange choice for "fake code for marketing website" even if it was correct code...
Oh, wait, even better, every time the page loads in the code graphic swaps from one arcane language to another.
And to boot: no USB4, & unergonomic ISO key layout instead of an ANSI option
I can only recommend this laptop.
(But you are right, maybe I should have formulated it better. I meant all Laptops with dGPU they offer are with a Nvidia dGPU.)
Laptops with Nvidia dGPUs are available from many/most other manufacturers, as you said, so there is no real reason to buy them from them. Especially if they offer sub-par Linux experience.
Their can't keep up with the demand on the laptop market. How old are their Zen 4 processors? There are barely laptops with them. We had to wait months for a real use benchmark because it was impossible to get them.
Right now if I see and AMD GPU I wouldn't even know if it's new gen or from 3 years ago.
They are not on the market mobile market.
I don’t know if they make them anymore but I highly recommend it.
Not that this is relevant for this laptop.
From experience, open-source drivers that are integrated into the kernel and open-source source user space have much better quality, better out-of-box experience, and push the whole ecosystem forward.
Compared to closed-source drivers, which often need to catch up to modern software, and are difficult to debug, they need additional steps to integrate and often have to build their own stuff instead of improving existing solutions that help everyone.
You will not get helpful support for errors in your proprietary driver from the manifacturer in most cases, while you get support and fixes from the open source community. It is much easier to isolate the issues if you can access the code.
The M2 MacBook Pros are about as close as you can get to a perfect laptop. Really, I wish it wasn't so. It would arguably be better for everyone (except Apple) if there was some serious competition at the top end of the market. But there just isn't.
I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management. (A lot of this is an OS integration problem, so Apple is playing on easy mode here.)
I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad. (Again, OS integration, plus a stupid amount of heuristics built into the hardware itself to interpret what you actually meant when you touched the trackpad in an awkward way.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks. (The first generation of M1 MacBook laptops was awful, but they fixed it. Also this point isn't really fair because I haven't really seriously looked.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.
I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time, and not simultaneously sounds like a jet engine and throttle itself to a near halt.
But really, just give me proper power management and a decent trackpad and I'll call it a serious competitor.
Apple’s silicon helps here but I wonder if part of the problem isn’t x86 laptop manufacturers trying too hard to juice perf numbers at the cost of all else, as well as penny pinching on heatsink and fan.
It feels like nobody* else is even _trying_.
(*Except Framework. Those guys are awesome.)
They are obviously doing a great job at what they set out to do but besides reparability and customization I don't think they are really ahead in anything compared to some premium Windows laptops.
AMD laptops seem to be pretty decent at that. You can get something on par or even ahead of MBPs in battery life and performance and just a bit louder fans (IMHO the Air is till unbeatable if it works for your use case though)
I'd trade lower build quality and performance per watt for software freedom any day of the week. No, Asahi Linux is not a serious option.
My reasons for not considering it:
- As skilled as the Asahi team is, they're a small team going against one of the world's largest corporations. Not only does it take immense effort to reverse engineer every single hardware component, the project will always be at the mercy of Apple, who may break the support at any time with a software or hardware update, whether willing or unwillingly.
- The Linux software ecosystem is sufficiently unstable on its own, but also running it on ARM, _and_ an alien hardware environment, presents even more challenges. As much as the Asahi team has made progress here, expecting them to support all variations of software in this landscape is unreasonable. I definitely don't want to have additional issues to troubleshoot, which I'm tired of doing with Linux to begin with. Cue the replies claiming how Asahi works flawlessly...
That's a whole lot of shaky ground to base my computing on, and I wouldn't consider it even for personal, let alone professional, use. Maybe if Apple started opening up and officially supporting Linux on their hardware, I _might_ consider a project like Asahi, but until then, it's a non-starter for me.
They don't support variations of software at all. They support the hardware. If the drivers work then the software just works. Software is built on APIs. Asahi does not need to support applications.
> always be at the mercy of Apple, who may break the support at any time
Same deal for any other hardware manufacturer. The x86 PC manufacturers are still using proprietary undocumented hardware components to this day, even the ones who you believe are "officially" supporting Linux. It only works because devs are reverse engineering devices without support from the manufacturers.
> but also running it on ARM, _and_ an alien hardware environment, presents even more challenges
ARM is a stable well supported platform for Linux, so the CPU is less of an issue for Asahi devs. Graphics hardware is somewhat "Alien" but is also stable now on Asahi.
From their FAQ page[1]:
> We will eventually release a remix of Arch Linux ARM, packaged for installation by end-users, as a distribution of the same name. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects. The distribution will be a convenient package for easy installation by end-users and give them access to bleeding-edge versions of the software we develop.
As distro maintainers, it is their job to make sure the applications they package work on the hardware they support. This includes submitting patches upstream when that is not the case, as application maintainers likely wouldn't want to support such a niche environment directly. So, yes, they rely on volunteers to fix issues, but they will likely have to support many applications themselves.
There is still a lot of broken software, as this list[2] is surely not exhaustive.
Regardless, all this amounts to less choice of software for the user. The Asahi team has already decided to stop supporting Xorg, and say what you will about Xorg, there will be many applications they realistically can't or won't support for whatever reason.
> Same deal for any other hardware manufacturer. [...] Really not much different to other hardware manufacturers since Linux started.
No, it's very different. First of all, the amount of Linux hackers who volunteered to reverse engineer the wide variety of hardware was orders of magnitude larger than the Asahi team. Even if they limit the amount of devices they support, modern computers are far more complex than in the early days of Linux. Regardless of how talented the Asahi team is, maintaining all the hardware of a modern computer is a sisyphean task for a small group of volunteers.
Secondly, hardware manufacturers could see the benefit of getting their hardware to run in Linux, and many eventually took over support from volunteers. Apple has shown no interest in doing so, and has historically been hostile to open source.
> Asahi devs have made it clear that Apple has chosen to avoid blocking installation of other operating systems.
The fact they allow installation of other operating systems today, doesn't mean that this decision couldn't change in the future. Services are a large part of their business, and allowing a group of hackers to use their hardware without being part of their software ecosystem may seem like a non-issue today, but if this group grows larger assuming projects like Asahi are successful, this might become a considerable loss of income which wouldn't be in their best interest.
> Apple has no issue with it.
Can you point me to an official ackgnowledgment of Asahi Linux by Apple? Or any indication that leaving this door open was a sign of good will, instead of a lack of interest in closing it? What makes you think they wouldn't eventually lock down Macs in the same way they do iPhones and iPads?
> ARM is a stable well supported platform for Linux
It's really not. A lot of software works, but when it doesn't, the user is SOL. As you can see on their Broken Software page[2], the major issue is precisely with AArch64 support. This should improve eventually, and Asahi is certainly a torchbearer in this scenario, but today it's yet another hurdle of using Apple hardware.
[1]: https://asahilinux.org/about/#is-this-a-linux-distribution
[2]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software
No but there is this:
"Does Apple allow this? Don’t you need a jailbreak? Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development)."
> A lot of software works, but when it doesn't, the user is SOL.
Talking about the Kernel (Linux itself). Applications are another story.
You are looking at it all from a very conservative enterprise perspective. Worried about long term support etc for a mission critical system. Asahi is not pretending to be an enterprise solution.
For someone just using it on their laptop, none of this is much of an issue.
If Asahi works today on your M1 Pro, and its good enough for your daily work, then it's fine. If support disappears in a few years, then simply switch to another device at that time. At least you will have had a few years of use out of a decent machine. Life is too short to worry too much about these things as an individual just using their laptop as a workstation or for personal use. Worst case in five years just buy another laptop that works for you, and move on.
Also, how do they know that "Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs"? Again, I would like to see some official confirmation from Apple.
> Worried about long term support etc for a mission critical system. Asahi is not pretending to be an enterprise solution.
No, I'm looking at it from the perspective of a single user for personal, and potentially professional, use. I _really_ don't want to go back to the user experience of Linux in the 90s, when barely anything worked, and the user had to spend hours tinkering to get basic features working, if they were supported at all. If that sounds fun for you, go ahead and enjoy the Apple hardware, but I'd like my machines to work. I'm annoyed by mainstream Linux enough as it is; I really don't need more reasons to dislike it.
> If Asahi works today on your M1 Pro, and its good enough for your daily work, then it's fine.
Buying a $2k machine to realize it doesn't support my workflow seems like a risky investment. As well as being at the mercy of a small group of volunteers and a trillion dollar corporation that it will continue to work for at least a few years.
[1]: https://asahilinux.org/2021/03/progress-report-january-febru...
They don't. And it really doesn't matter to some people. The current hardware is not locked down, therefore it can always run Linux. Future devices are not guaranteed to work, but those do not exist today.
> Buying a $2k machine to realize it doesn't support my workflow
You're simply not the target user. The people who are enthusiastically using Asahi know what to expect and are happy with it as it runs the software they need to use today. Of course it is not a mainstream option that every Linux user can use.
> that it will continue to work for at least a few years.
Once the hardware in your device is reverse engineered and drivers developed for it, that is done and will continue to work for a long time. The risk is future devices (Apple M6, M7, etc).
> I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management.
That's the advantage of Apple where they control both hardware and software. It's hard to replicate, so yeah, they have an edge here.
> I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad.
Never understood this comment, if you use keyboards instead for shortcuts the trackpad is hardly something you care about. this seems like a comment from Apple users who justify the trackpad as the key differentiator to not even consider anything else, even though the rest of the world has no problem not using Apple trackpads.
> I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks.
Lenovo Thinkpad line has world-class keyboards that put the Macbook's to shame.
> laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.
display, they certainly have good ones, but most of them are not matte. As for the chassis, there's really nothing special in having a uniform grey chassis - it's a matter of taste rather than anything else.
> I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time,
Recent AMD CPUs equipped PC, running Linux, fit that description - they are formidable machines with great performance for a variety of workloads and while you will hear the fan now and then, it's still much better than what you had a few years ago.
Or as shockingly as it seems other people might have preferences which are different to yours and which are not somehow inherent inferior to yours.
> else, even though the rest of the world has no problem not using Apple trackpads.
If you go few years back same could've been said about appalling battery life, poor screen and build quality and a dozen other things. I had not problem using computers back then because I didn't know it could be better so just had to deal with it. Going back to something objectively inferior is not that easy (e.g. I almost always used an external mouse until the first retina MBP, I haven't really felt the need to since then except occasionally for gaming).
Never heard the fan on my M1 Pro in a year of ownership, and temperature is never uncomfortably high.
I'll pay double just to never hear a shitty laptop fan.
> but most of them are not matte
It is a matter of preference. Matte reduces contrast, saturation, and sharpness. I noticed Apple uses a higher quality anti-reflective coating than my other (cheap non-Apple branded) glossy desktop LCD. No distracting reflections on the laptop, but the desktop monitor looks like a mirror sometimes.
It's like a mattress: you spend enough time on it that it's worth paying the money and moving on.
That's a very first world comment
At a moderate $80k USD developer salary, the laptop costs only 0.5% of that. And this is the main tool you depend on to earn an income. For an underpaid junior developer earning $40k it's still only 1% of their income.
10% of an average developer salary is something like $8k per year. What laptop costs $8k per year? That's $40k after five years. Are you confusing a laptop with a new Mercedes or what?
Laptops are a business expense for a developer. This is how you need to think about it.
I live in one and my salary is a little less than 30k and I'm not a junior. My junior colleagues are at around 20k, so for them it's actually 10%.
So apparently first world is not the same as "high income". In that case I would buy something from Taiwan.
I’m glad these options exist such as Tuxedo.
And for many HN users, they do get paid to use Mac OS and offered a Macbook for work. I personally still use Linux for work but I have to admit it hinders my work in certain ways (e.g. no easy access to testing Safari and no way to test VoiceOver). But I couldn't trade my setup for whatever Apple decides is best for me. So I appreciate companies still pushing for more solid Linux-first laptops.
The other day I was trying to set the scroll speed (and have it consistent for all apps) on KDE and it was quite a struggle. AFAIK it just works on Gnome/Wayland but having to chose between something as basic as this and using a DE the UX of which I personally find slightly repulsive (at least in default config) doesn't seem ideal.
> Just like the CPU, the LPDDR RAM is also soldered onto the motherboard [...]
> Another advantage of LPDDR RAM is its space-saving design, which creates room in the ultra compact chassis not only for the performant and quiet cooling system but also for 2x upgradeable M.2 SSDs [...]
Also, doesn't DDR5 have built-in ECC?
Also, the website talks about M.2 for the SSD form factor. M.2 describes a physical connector standard. I would imagine that's enough to imply that it's not soldered SSDs.
On the plus side they really do support Linux, they provide a kernel module and control center app to control things like keyboard leds and power profiles, which does a good job. I find this quite good for a small company like Tuxedo.
I'm happy with my laptop and will consider Tuxedo again next time I need a computer, but I definitely advise to look at reviews beforehand.
I had originally ordered a different, slightly more expensive model, and had no trouble at all with customer service to send it back in exchange for the Aura and a refund, which impressed me very positively.
I run Debian on the laptop and had no trouble with it.
FFIW, you could probably install Arch (from a TTY, like in the old days :p) with the an Ubuntu kernel and any firmware that was loaded-in at runtime from the stock installation-- I'm not convinced it would be neccessary, but Linux is Linux and (most) differences between (most) distributions are minor enough that someone who knows how to troubleshoot this sort of thing could factor them out.