Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

starlabs.systems

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 388 posts

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#51

Post by userbinator »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #16
hedora wrote: post #2

This Linux laptop looks too good to be true. It's available with an AMD or Intel processor, there aren't any strange ergonomic decisions (other than the stow-able web-cam). In particular, they centered they trackpad + keyboard, and it looks like it has decent thermals. The battery is rated for 18 hours. You can choose between a medium resolution, high frame rate display (UHD @ 165Hz) or a 4K 60Hz display. The screen…

Soldered ram is pretty unfortunate. They're also charging a ton for storage upgrades (e.g. $300 vs market rate of ~$80 for 1TB pcie 4.0 ssd).

They've clearly learned some things from Apple.

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#52

Post by aetherspawn »

noobermin wrote: post #43
aetherspawn wrote: post #34

Honestly as a business customer I can’t justify buying this unless there is an option to unbrand it. (Actually if you had a unbranding option we could sticker it with our own company logo and that could be pretty cool) Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile busin…

What a strange set of considerations so bizarre they apply to like no one but you. Good thing that is the case and this logic applies to a dwindling number of professionals. I understand how people can judge on such minor things but on that front, might as well not hire any black people or women on your team lest you heighten your customers' subconcious biases. edit: also, would a linux laptop work for you? Wouldn't…

VDI scenario is common now for engineers, so yes it would work to virt into a windows box, but yes there are other friction points such as compact issues with PowerPoint for meetings, and you probably wouldn’t run a PowerPoint over a virt.

It could also take a lot of messing around to get Office 365 MDM working with Linux. I think you'd want to do a Linux desktop deploy and sort out these issues before you tried to deploy [any of these brands of] Linux laptops.

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#53

Post by lucb1e »

Does anyone here run any of these OSes on any of the offered screen densities and resolutions? I have questions.

- Surely not every old program available from the repositories will work with display scaling, will they? I've never had to use it, maybe Xorg has some hack to scale certain windows at 2x so you don't need support from individual packages. I'm also thinking of things like Burp Suite, which have window-like objects that interact horribly with things like i3 (from what I see with colleagues), so those might have similar issues when you have to tell Xorg to scale individual windows up. Is this something you run into?

- How much of an impact does that resolution have on battery life and GPU performance? I do not need more than 1920x1080 pixels on a 16" diagonal, my eyes can hardly read small fonts on that DPI as it is (I'm ~30) and they're not going to get better with age. This laptop ships with either double or quadruple that, making me wonder what the trade-off is like of having this (for me) gimmick. Surely it doesn't double/quadruple the battery drain or halve/quarter the performance compared to a normal screen?

- I also don't see flickering at 60 Hz (heck, 24 Hz TV looks smooth to me), so 165 Hz seems again like a battery drainer and performance reducer. How much of an impact does it have to try and render 2.75x as many frames per second on a GPU? Does it simply use 2.75x more power for the GPU or reduce the number of drawing operations you can do on the GPU by 2.75 times, or does this not work that way?

Edit: this is currently at the top, but I don't want the top comment to be criticism. This product is awesome in virtually every other regard besides shipping time. Good physical size, decent number of USB ports, customization of the keyboard, c-c-coreboot?! Officially supported? I am definitely impressed. Heck, even the payment methods impress me, being able to select iDeal at a small foreign shop.

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#54

Post by chx »

hedora wrote: post #2

This Linux laptop looks too good to be true. It's available with an AMD or Intel processor, there aren't any strange ergonomic decisions (other than the stow-able web-cam). In particular, they centered they trackpad + keyboard, and it looks like it has decent thermals. The battery is rated for 18 hours. You can choose between a medium resolution, high frame rate display (UHD @ 165Hz) or a 4K 60Hz display. The screen…

> Am I missing something?

Yeah. The company is three people with practically no money at hand. I can't imagine this being real. Check "full accounts made up to 28 February 2022" https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... with cash at hand being just 13,887 pounds. How on earth are you making a laptop from that? Framework started with a nine million seed round and had the former head of hardware at Oculus as the founder for expertise in this field. Now, almost eight figures is prolly overkill but I have hard time imagining low five figures being enough. It doesn't mean there's malicious intent here, they just might not be fully aware of the challenges here and will find themselves in way over their head.

Note there's no doxxing here, the CRN is on the contact us page: https://starlabs.systems/pages/contact-us

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#55

Post by justsomehnguy »

noobermin wrote: post #43
aetherspawn wrote: post #34

Honestly as a business customer I can’t justify buying this unless there is an option to unbrand it. (Actually if you had a unbranding option we could sticker it with our own company logo and that could be pretty cool) Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile busin…

What a strange set of considerations so bizarre they apply to like no one but you. Good thing that is the case and this logic applies to a dwindling number of professionals. I understand how people can judge on such minor things but on that front, might as well not hire any black people or women on your team lest you heighten your customers' subconcious biases. edit: also, would a linux laptop work for you? Wouldn't…

> What a strange set of considerations so bizarre they apply to like no one but you

Oh, sweet non-corporate bullshit child.

People get shown the door for just having non-Apple devices with them.

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#56

Post by ahoya »

hedora wrote: post #2

This Linux laptop looks too good to be true. It's available with an AMD or Intel processor, there aren't any strange ergonomic decisions (other than the stow-able web-cam). In particular, they centered they trackpad + keyboard, and it looks like it has decent thermals. The battery is rated for 18 hours. You can choose between a medium resolution, high frame rate display (UHD @ 165Hz) or a 4K 60Hz display. The screen…

I have their latest starbook, just arrived a couple months ago and it is stellar. Covid delayed it almost a whole year, but in that time they upgraded frob adwertised 11th gen intel to 12th gen for free, quadrupling cores. It runs extremeley well with latest coreboot and everything. I considered canceling my pre-order because of the long delay, but Support was extremely quick and receptive and it turns out the trust they earned was warranted. I did a lot of research and really nothing comes close to these guys. This new one is expensive relatively, but the Starbook I have was a surprisingly good deal. No connection to them except a happy customer who can gladly recommend them.

Fully upgradable SSD and raM as well, I have 64 gigs and the touchpad is really really good.

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#58

Post by yellowapple »

chungy wrote: post #40
aetherspawn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying anything outside the Dell or Lenovo business ecosystem really puts your head on the chopping block to be announced a crazy person the minute some business critical function (like dual monitors through dock) doesn’t work…

You need to find a better company with a better corporate culture.

Those are in much shorter supply than you seem to imply.

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#59

Post by ahoya »

neatze wrote: post #20

If this laptop is real deal, for me, it will be really hard decision which one to buy; StarFighter or Framework.

Practically as upgradable and maintainable/repairable as the framework. They sell all of the components separately, and this runs a fully up-to-date coreboot and even esoteric linux systems get tested on it. It is a significantly better Linux computer.

Re: StarFighter 16 inch: 4K Coreboot/Ryzen Linux laptop

#60

Post by thaumaturgy »

wyldfire wrote: post #47
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was confused as well. I looked it up and apparently it's a reference to The Last Starfighter movie.

Don't trust the posts above! These were written by spies from Rylos! Once we smash the Frontier we will be able to rid ourselves of the Star League!

Centauri! Is that you? It's been a while.
Post reply on HN