Chuwi Minibook X
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Chuwi Minibook X
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Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#2I love small laptops but this thing would really benefit from a better processor. It's about 4x slower than the Snapdragon 8 elite, a 2 year old smartphone chip.
16GB ram is cool though.
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#3I have this laptop, and it is amongst the best laptops I have ever owned, despite being awful in many ways. It has almost completely replaced my use of my M4 Macbook Pro, simply because I always have it with me. That, and it can run Linux.
I don't share the complaints of the OP about the keyboard or the screen, though. The keyboard is fine, I can hit about 110WPM on it, slower than my regular pace, but enough that there's no dramas. The layout is great: Occasionally there's keys that are too small (looking at you, apostrophe) but everything is at least in the right spot, which is way more important.
The 2K display at 10" is high enough DPI that everything is totally crisp, and you can unlock ~95Hz (bad for video, good for everything else) with a bit of a tweak. You can also smash a byte into the EC at the correct offset and access the full unrestricted BIOS -- mostly to crank the RAM up to 4800MT/s.
I'm running vanilla Arch with Niri and Noctalia, and it's a dream. It's my primary dev machine, used in combination with a remote server with a tonne more grunt. If it broke tomorrow, I'd buy another - and I wouldn't do that with my macbook.
To the OP:
* Accelerometer support, EC-byte-bashing to get BIOS unlock: https://github.com/greymouser/minibook-x-tools
* 95Hz EDID fix: https://github.com/sonnyp/linux-minibook-x/issues/7#issuecom...
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#4I miss my Sony Vaio P series which fitted in a similar sort of niche, the cellphone radio made it just by far the best laptop I've ever used. Modern laptops don't seem to have provision for a LTE/5G radio which always confuses me a bit, in this form factor it would be ideal. I'm surprised nobody has cloned this actually, with phone screens being the right aspect ratio it seems obvious.
https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/2014/10/03/9f923860-4b47-11e4-b6...
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#5I love small laptops but this thing would really benefit from a better processor. It's about 4x slower than the Snapdragon 8 elite, a 2 year old smartphone chip. 16GB ram is cool though.
I think the "net" does a lot of heavy lifting for a box like this - e.g. you do all the important work on a remote server, and only do basic maintenance work on the laptop itself.
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#6The Minibook X is obviously targeted at the netbook form factor in the traditional sense, i.e. small and cheap. If you're like me and appreciate the netbook/UMPC form factors (for travel purposes in my case) but also need better specs to actually get any work done -- and you're willing to fork out a bit more to get that -- I would recommend looking at GPD's Pocket and MicroPC series. I own both a Pocket 4 and MicroPC 2 with Linux on them, and I'm quite satisfied. The only issue I've noticed is the same screen rotation quirk described here, for which the same workarounds apply.
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#7The Minibook X is obviously targeted at the netbook form factor in the traditional sense, i.e. small and cheap. If you're like me and appreciate the netbook/UMPC form factors (for travel purposes in my case) but also need better specs to actually get any work done -- and you're willing to fork out a bit more to get that -- I would recommend looking at GPD's Pocket and MicroPC series. I own both a Pocket 4 and MicroPC…
The GDP devices are amazing except for the keyboard, which is some fever dream layout I've never been able to understand. https://img.website.xin/contents/sitefiles3601/18006016/imag...
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#8I have this laptop, and it is amongst the best laptops I have ever owned, despite being awful in many ways. It has almost completely replaced my use of my M4 Macbook Pro, simply because I always have it with me. That, and it can run Linux. I don't share the complaints of the OP about the keyboard or the screen, though. The keyboard is fine, I can hit about 110WPM on it, slower than my regular pace, but enough that th…
Did you also have the screen rotation issue? Curious to know what's causing that.
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#9I have this laptop, and it is amongst the best laptops I have ever owned, despite being awful in many ways. It has almost completely replaced my use of my M4 Macbook Pro, simply because I always have it with me. That, and it can run Linux. I don't share the complaints of the OP about the keyboard or the screen, though. The keyboard is fine, I can hit about 110WPM on it, slower than my regular pace, but enough that th…
Did you also have the screen rotation issue? Curious to know what's causing that.
The cause is just that the panel is mounted rotated on the device. It's supposed to be used in a tablet where the top is the short end and the side is the long end, opposite to a laptop.
Re: Chuwi Minibook X
#10The Minibook X is obviously targeted at the netbook form factor in the traditional sense, i.e. small and cheap. If you're like me and appreciate the netbook/UMPC form factors (for travel purposes in my case) but also need better specs to actually get any work done -- and you're willing to fork out a bit more to get that -- I would recommend looking at GPD's Pocket and MicroPC series. I own both a Pocket 4 and MicroPC…
The GDP devices are amazing except for the keyboard, which is some fever dream layout I've never been able to understand. https://img.website.xin/contents/sitefiles3601/18006016/imag...
This is the primary reason the Minibook X won out in my searches: It's the only small device that has a keyboard layout that puts all of the keys in the right spots.
They're sometimes an odd size, but when I hit the wrong key due to a sizing constraint, I don't even have to think: Backspace, hit the right key with mildly adjusted positioning.
I've tried a few machines with different layouts, and that's never the case - and having to stop and look at the keyboard to find a key interrupts flow in the worst kind of way.