I wrote a blog post about my experience with the Minisforum V3 AMD Tablet, focusing on how Linux/Fedora/KDE works on this device and how Linux performs on the tablet devices.
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This thing really does have everything 🥲
Thank you very much for the Linux coverage for it. Does the stylus still work in external display mode? That would be the dream…
Sadly the stylus isn’t working in external display mode. I really hope they can work on this… (I think it’s achievable as they already made the keyboard working)
Only 6 hours on battery? That’s pretty low I’d have thought.
During my normal usage in Linux, which includes web browsing with Firefox, video playback with Haruna Media Player (with
hwdecset toauto), writing in Obsidian, and lightweight coding in Visual Studio Code and Android Studio, the tablet lasts for 6 hours.There’s no such thing as lightweight android studio lol. The battery would likely last much longer just playing a movie at low brightness, which is usually what hardware companies do to measure and advertise battery life.
A surface pro gets 3-4 hours in my experience.
Even the surface book 3 with it’s two batteries only got 7 hours for me with use.
It’s all about the TDP of the chip, pixel density and refresh rate of the screen and battery capacity.
Recipe for long battery life is low power CPU, lower resolution (HD vs UHD) screen, no touch input, bigger battery.
Tablets don’t usually follow that recipe.
And lower refresh rate.
TDP of the CPU is largely irrelevant if battery life is the goal. You can crank the power down on any Intel system, but you’re still going to get shit battery life of the CPU can’t return to idle.
Older AMD Ryzen chips got amazing battery life at any load. But they’ve been following intel’s race to idle as quickly as possible and battery life at low-mid loads has suffered dramatically. ARM cpus are much better in that regard.
The Zen3+ Ryzens all have lower threshold power modes, it’s just that the dupes tuning a lot of BIOS presets have all the settings whacked out to run them at variable settings. If you get a well tuned BIOS, you get good battery life. The Linux 6.8+ governor settings also allow all individual core engagement with governors, which had a 40-60% battery life boost for some Ryzen chips. The 8000’s should perform even better.
Nice review, thanks for sharing! I was curious about how the V3 was with Linux. I’ve got a Minisforum UM780 mini PC with a 7840HS, which I use as a homelab box, and it’s been excellent on Arch. I was tempted to get the V3 as well, but 14" is a bit too big for my use case (primarily as a tablet).
But it’s nice knowing that even the fingerprint reader worked out of the box, I know that’s been a sore point for many Linux users. The battery life seems a bit on the lower end though - have you tried TuneD yet? Apparently some folks have experienced better battery life with it, compared to PPD. I’m also curious what the battery life would be like if you ran a distro which used x86-64-v4 packages, such as CachyOS, in theory you should get better battery life since you’d be using more optimised instructions.
Thanks for the information! I’ll definitely try TuneD to see how it can improve battery life. CachyOS looks interesting and promising, I’ll test it with a USB SSD.
That’s a very thorough review and interesting to read. Thank you!
That looks like such a cool device! I’ve been wondering what to replace my 2017 macbook with in the next few years and it’s nice to see more options to consider. Maybe it won’t be a refurbished ThinkPad.
Just a heads up for anyone in the US wanting one, if you sign up for the pre-sale alert, they’ll pretty immediately send you the invite to buy one.
Need to get some OT soon haha
I’ve been looking for a Linux tablet for a while and I think I finally found it. Well written review and I hope it gets better support once released globally.
Good writeup. I wannit
Did I miss how many nits at full brightness? I use an old Toughpad because it’s 1000nits is usable outdoors.
500nits according to the store.
523 nits according to multiple reviewers.
That’s probably not too bad for daylight.
So you cram all the internals into a form factor that can’t breathe. Then…you slap a keyboard and trackpad on it anyway.
I really just…don’t understand tablets.
Dammit, I really wish I could get this in my country. I love the tablet form factor and it ticks all the boxes I want for my next laptop :(
