Kubuntu Focus Offers The Most Polished KDE Laptop Experience We've Seen Yet

[Charlie68]

I'm not a Kubuntu user, but I'm happy to see a notebook with KDE. In addition, the optimizations made will certainly improve the experience.

[Danny3]

Is the manufacturer suicidal or what ?
How can anyone make a Linux laptop with Nvidia ?
For me this is definitely DOA.
I will never buy a laptop that contains a garbage part (Nvidia GPU).
And of course in a few years, when Nvidia decides to stop supporting their GPU on the proprietary driver, this will become real garbage.

[Cerberus]

Is the manufacturer suicidal or what ?
How can anyone make a Linux laptop with Nvidia ?
For me this is definitely DOA.
I will never buy a laptop that contains a garbage part (Nvidia GPU).
And of course in a few years, when Nvidia decides to stop supporting their GPU on the proprietary driver, this will become real garbage.

This is not a Linux manufacturer, just like every other "Linux" laptop out there it is a Clevo computer assembled and sold by various Linux and Windows resellers like System76, PC Specialist, Schenker etc. At best Linux resellers install custom BIOS on them, but they are barebones computers by and large intended for Windows although many are great for Linux.

[zexelon]

Is the manufacturer suicidal or what ?
How can anyone make a Linux laptop with Nvidia ?
For me this is definitely DOA.
I will never buy a laptop that contains a garbage part (Nvidia GPU).
And of course in a few years, when Nvidia decides to stop supporting their GPU on the proprietary driver, this will become real garbage.

Personally I have to say the choice to go Nvidia is the right one. Open source graphics drivers by and large blow chunks. I run Nvidia with the proprietary drivers on both my desktop and my M.L. box and it rocks!

Open source is awesome... but not if it costs performance.

[madscientist159]

Personally I have to say the choice to go Nvidia is the right one. Open source graphics drivers by and large blow chunks. I run Nvidia with the proprietary drivers on both my desktop and my M.L. box and it rocks!

Open source is awesome... but not if it costs performance.

You should really try a non-obsolete kernel. We run Vega, Navi, and some older Polaris cards and by and large they work very, very well. I've had far more problematic experiences with NVIDIA over time, centering around the proprietary drivers, and that's not even going into the security and privacy issues that run rampant in the proprietary NVIDIA driver stack. Check out the CVEs sometime, then realize no one other than NVIDIA can fix them, or in many cases easily detect them. I especially like CVE-2016-7382, "...allow users to gain access to arbitrary physical memory, leading to an escalation of privileges".

Could the AMD drivers use more work? Absolutely. I have a short list of features I'd like to see (chief among them proper 3D quad buffered surfaces), but none of them could make me even think of going back to NVIDIA. The last NVIDIA card I used dates from back in the GK104 days, and ran nouveau, not the proprietary driver -- that switch was done after the more significant driver CVEs started coming out and NVIDIA showed no signs of taking financial responsibility for stolen user data...

[danmcgrew]

What's the cost of this unit?

[Paradigm Shifter]

That KDE theme looks pretty good. Is that the default for Kubuntu? With the taskbar on the right? Or custom for this laptop?

I'll download the 19.10 iso and have a quick look.

[deppman]

What's the cost of this unit?

Base unit is very well equipped and optimized for $2395. This is similar to S76 or other boutique offerings with the same options, but of course it is more thoroughly tested and optimized for KDE and enterprise use. Enterprise is the reason we ship with default disk encryption, cloud drive support, and 18.04.3 LTS (interim releases are not supported by many software vendors and the backports is stable and quite current). Of course, 2020.04 LTS will be available soon and is currently in testing.

You can find the Clevo960RD for less, but it will have a pokey SSD, 8GB of RAM, etc. Once you add back the options and an enterprise OS (e.g. W10 Pro) the price will be similar, but you won't have that awesome optimization and run-from-the-web-page capability found at https://kfocus.org/support

To paraphrase Lee Iacocca, if you can find a better works-out-of-the-box, enterprise-ready laptop, buy it.

[deppman]

That KDE theme looks pretty good. Is that the default for Kubuntu? With the taskbar on the right? Or custom for this laptop?

I'll download the 19.10 iso and have a quick look.

Oh, its very much optimized for what we feel is the best UX. KDE agree that it is best to think of their software suite as highly flexible desktop framework upon which one can build great experience. The default is good, but we feel strongly that this is far better. Take a screen shot of the default UX, and then compare with Focus. Both are still pure Kubuntu but they look substantially different and (we feel) the Focus is far more efficient with features like normalized keyboard settings, maximized usable vertical height, panel moved away from work focus, the hints panel, and a less glaring theme applied across almost all apps.

It is also tuned for the hardware through kernel modules and other settings. Things that happen when you load Kubntu on the p960rd directly (like sound not working, or show desktop grid hanging for 20s, or crashing file indexing, no keyboard RGB controls, or dozens of other big and little niggles) are fixed on the Focus. Quite frankly, this is the laptop I've wanted for years as a software architect but could never get from any vendor. And I've been buying and advocating S76 for many years.

[Britoid]

How polished is the boot process?

Nvidia drivers tend to break all the nice boot splash options.

Despite the pointless modesets, the Nvidia modeset driver should allow the boot splash to look remotely polished.