Slimbook KDE Plasma VI Laptop Announced - Powered By AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS

The Slimbook crew shared on Twitter/X that they are showing off the new Slimbook 6 (Slimbook VI) laptop this weekend during the KDE Akademy conference taking place in the wonderful Würzburg, Germany. This new Slimbook laptop features an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS SoC and of course uses the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment out-of-the-box.

The new Slimbook Plasma 6 laptop is detailed on kde.slimbook.es and features an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS SoC with integrated Radeon 780M graphics, a 2560 x 1600 display, an aluminum chassis, and non-soldered DDR5-5600 memory. KDE Neon is the default Linux distribution of this Slimbook laptop. There are two DDR5 slots allowing for up to 96GB of memory as well as two NVMe M.2 2280 slots. The laptop is equipped with a 68Wh battery.

The Ryzen 7 8845HS is still a very capable Zen 4 laptop SoC albeit unfortunate this new Slimbook is being announced with the Ryzen AI 300 series being announced one month ago. The Ryzen AI 300 series brings the Zen 5 CPU cores, the much more efficient RDNA3.5 graphics, and more powerful NPU. It's unfortunate the lead time still for particularly the smaller vendors in launching newer AMD/Intel laptops. But, yes, the Ryzen 7 8845HS is still very capable.

It's also interesting that Slimbook is talking up the NPU capabilities with the Ryzen SoC. Yes, the NPU is present and there has been the out-of-tree AMD Ryzen AI XDNA Linux driver since earlier this year, but it's not yet upstream and far from a comprehensive or compelling Linux experience at this point. The XDNA Linux driver is under review for upstreaming into the mainline kernel but not yet and still doesn't look like it will be ready for the upcoming v6.12 cycle. Hopefully in 2025 the Ryzen AI NPU becomes more compelling under Linux.

Pricing on this Slimbook AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS laptop is 1,099.00 € with assembly in 10 to 14 days. More details on the new Slimbook KDE-focused Linux laptop at kde.slimbook.es.