I bought an new laptop – I mean really a “new” laptop. I decided to buy this time a new laptop with preinstalled, encrypted Linux operating system Tuxedo OS 1 (based on Ubuntu 22.04) and I’ve chosen the Tuxedo Pulse 15 Gen2.
General Description
You may use the link above to get more technical information about this laptop. In this posting I only mention some informations which seem to be perhaps not mentioned somewhere and are important for me.
In the past I have used several other machines – the Thinkpad W530 (the last classical Thinpad machine from Lenovo with good quality):
Then the 17” ZBook17, Gen2 from HP – dated a little bit later than the W530 – but with lots of room inside. But a very heavy laptop (around 3.x kg), coming into age and when working – getting louder and louder now.
Then at the beginning of this year I bought a newer machine – the Huawei Matebook 16 (AMD CPU pretty similar to the Pulse machine) – and used it in a dual boot configuration for Windows and Linux:
The Matebook has much more power than the older machines – and I installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on that machine. The keyboard is not that good as on the older machines and has some quality problems. The left shift key is sometimes not working very well. The dual boot options is making problems with new versions of the kernel and VirtualBox under Ubuntu. I’ve to sign the Ubuntu VirtualBox files again and again to be able to start the VirtualBox. No sound under Linux, no background light of the keyboard … and no rj45 tcpip network port …
The machine has only 16 GB RAM and this is a main limiting point under Linux when doing development in the area I am working with. I assumed, that it would be ok, but I hit that limitation several times … and of course the builtin SSD with a size of 512GByte is also limiting. So I added an external hub to get access to external harddisc drives, I added a new power supply (based on USB-C) to feed the hub and the additional drives. That became a cable mess …. and at one working event, I forgot an external SSD where some badly needed files were located on :-(.
So I looked for a new machine and the Matebook will become a Windows only machine now …
So I looked for a development machine with more RAM, more harddisc space and not as heavy as the ZBook17 I mentioned earlier.
The picture below show from top to buttom: Tuxedo, Matebook, Lenovo W530 and ZBook 17
And I wanted to have no problems with Linux and for the first time I decided to build a new, linux only laptop. I ordered it from the Tuxedo web-page and added additional RAM (now 64 GB) and harddisc space (now 4TB).
Ordering and Delivering
The laptop arrived around 10 days after I ordered it and it was well packaged and delivered to me. Actually I was surprised to get it delivered at that day – no information was sent to me, that I should prepare myself for the post man … I got that eMail notification two days later after arrival of the laptop. DHL seems to be very fast this time 🙂
Screen
The screen has a higher resolution than the ZBook or the Matebook – and normally this would be not useful for my eyes – but at 125% with KDE most of the tools can be used quite nice.
The screen is bright enough for me, the quality is good and I like the display.
Connectivity
The system has an additional HDMI port (which I use for a 4K display), the RJ45 network port and two fast USB port (the Matebook has also USB ports, but only slow ones) and one USB-C port. Perhaps useful may also the 3.5 sound port for external boxes.
Keyboard
The keyboard has the quality of the ZBook17, Gen2 keyboard I had used for some time in the past (which had the best keyboard I have ever worked with, even better than the Lenovo W530 I also used) and it is far better than the Matebook16 system. Yes, there is no numpad – but for a 15” laptop this is ok. The keys have the correct sizes for me and typing can be done pretty fast.
Strange for me is, that to press F12 (debugger tool in browsers) I have to press Fn and F12 to get there … normally I simply pressed F12 – but on this machine the laptop goes into the standby mode. I will learn that …
When I touch the keyboard the backlit light of the keyboard is going on and that is working under Linux. I never got this working with the Huawei Matebook 16.
Sound
It is working under Linux, out of the box. The quality is not that good and the speaker are located on the bottom side of the laptop. The Matebook 16 is much better in this area (under Windows), but the Matebook16 system is not yet supported under Ubuntu 22.04.
Fan Noise
The laptop is a pretty silent machine … but if you get an average load of about 6 over some time you will hear the machine. Some java programs will help you to find out … its not getting very much loader if you have a load of 6 or of 10.
The fan manages to cool the system down while the fan is running at around 60% and the system seems to be stable running at 3 Ghz. That are good news.
WebCam
A webcam is build into the system, just above the screen (and not as done at the MateBook in the keyboard ….). It is working, the quality is not so good – but for me totally ok.
Operating System
The OS behaves like an Ubuntu 22.04, but with a much nicer UI. During installation (or better final configuration) I was not able to enable the WLAN support to upgrade the system to the latest system level. After the installation this worked of course, so I made an update after that.
Conclusion
The system is working out of the box, has an up to date operating system, the UI looks pretty nice, is quite powerful with up to 16 threads, can be configured with up to 64 GB of RAM and both NVM SSDs are very fast. The screen has a very good quality … and its weight is around 1.5 kg.
Connections
The pictures show all possible connectors on the left and right of the computer:
So, that’s it for now … back to the computer and having fun.
Schrievkrom 