If only I needed a new laptop... KDE Slimbook Review
3,032The guys at Slimbook were nice enough to shower me with laptops to review, and one of these in particular caught my eye: the Slimbook KDE. It's a very, very fancy ultraportable laptop, made in collaboration with the KDE Community, and it's probably one of the best laptops I've ever used, even outside of the Linux world, so let's take a look
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The laptop itself is running on an AMD Ryzen base. It comes in a 14 inch and a 15 inch version, and I got the 15 inch version. Both devices come with a Ryzen 7 4800H, which is a pretty powerful CPU, and are configurable with up to 64Gb of RAM, and 2Tb of SSD, with a large choice of keyboard layouts, as usual with Slimbook.
The laptop itself starts at 929 euros with 8Gb of RAM and 256Gb of SSD, which isn't cheap, but we're in premium laptop territory here, so it's not crazy either.
My review unit came with 16Gb of RAM and 250Gb of SSD, so it's pretty much your standard configuration. The 15 inch version only weighs 1.5kg, which really feels super light when you're carrying the thing around.
Now what's striking with this device is the build quality. The whole chassis is made out of Magnesium, and feels really sturdy. There is no screen wobble when typing, almost no give at all on the keyboard, and that thing doesn't creak, or bend. It's one of the best chassis I've seen from a Linux device manufacturer. Now this begs the question of WHY would they add stickers to such a nice chassis. No less than 4 were added to my review unit, one to tell you it's made out of magnesium, one to tell you it's running GNU/Linux, and 2 separate stickers for AMD graphics et ryzen 7.
Talking about they keys, it's one of the best keyboards I've used in a looong time. It doesn't use the usual chiclet style, but goes for floating keys. Key travel is just sufficient, with a nice bounceback on the keys, and a soft feeling when typing. The sound is also really pleasing to me for some reason, some kind of deep bump, far from the clacky noise of the Magic Keyboard I use on my desktop.
Now, the trackpad itself is also really good, fully made out of glass. It's still a hinge design, meaning that the physical click is really only doable up until half of the trackpad, but it reminds me a lot of the previous generation of Macbook trackpads: it's super smooth, really precise, and really nice to use for day to day operations. Now it's too bad that KDE doesn't use trackpad gestures out of the box, because I'm pretty sure that this thing would be stellar on that front.
Now, the screen itself is a pretty good matte IPS panel. It's 1080p, at 60hz which is enough for a 15 inch, and has good color accuracy, seriously good viewing angles with no color shift, and it's bright enough. The bezels on that screen are minimal, at least on the top and the sides, the bottom one is a bit bigger. The webcam that lives in the top bezel is serviceable, going up to 720p at 30fps.
In terms of IO, you get a pop-up ethernet jack, one USB 2 and one USB 3 port, a headphone jack, and a micro SD card slot on the left side, and a barrel charger, an HDMI port, a USB 3 port, and a USB C port on the right side. The back is just used to expel hot air and cool the laptop.
Now, let's see how well that thing performs.
# Performance
The CPU is a ryzen 7 4800H, with 8 physical cores, and 16 threads. AS expected, it's extremely fast and powerful.
Running Geekbench 5, it got a single core score of 1259 and a multi core score of 7307. These scores are pretty good, handily beating the 10th gen core i7 I reviewed in the Juno Computers Neptune 15.
It's not even that far from my desktop ryzen 7 5800X on my desktop.
Now, the graphics part of that laptop is based on the Vega 7 architecture. It's good enough for graphics acceleration, and light gaming, and maybe even some AAA gaming as well.
Now in terms of battery life, the laptop doesn't disappoint either. It's got a 92 watt hour battery, which is more than enough for a day's work.