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

With this being the first time having my hands directly on the Intel Core i7-9750H, I was quite curious to see how it compares to the Ice Lake Core i7 1065G7 as found in the Dell XPS 7390, so I ran some benchmarks looking at that current XPS against the Kubuntu Focus.

The Kubuntu Focus with its higher-clocked, 6c/12t CPU easily performs much better than the Core i7 1065G7. Obviously in the graphics tests with the RTX 2060 can easily smash the Gen11 graphics, but in the CPU workloads tended to be quite sizable advantages.

For those wondering about Firefox browsing performance on the Kubuntu Focus, here are some Firefox data points. If you want to see how your existing Linux laptop compares, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2001158-HU-FIREFOXKU52.

There are a variety of other benchmarks in this result file. If you want to see how your own Linux system compares, simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2001157-HU-KUBUNTUFO51.

Additional benchmarks and further thoughts with the Kubuntu Focus forthcoming.

Overall, the Kubuntu Focus is an interesting Linux laptop and one of the few that is KDE-focused and also a portion of the sales are going back to the Kubuntu Council for funding their development efforts. On the downside, some may not like the use of NVIDIA graphics with this laptop, but that is what they are going with for the best Linux driver reliability and performance and laptop designs with Radeon graphics still being rather rare. But from our testing we haven't encountered any NVIDIA driver woes with the Kubuntu configuration currently loaded on this laptop. For those interested in the Kubuntu Focus, more information and pre-orders on the laptop are available from KFocus.org with planned availability starting in early February.