Razer Blade Stealth Laptop On Linux, Various Linux Laptop Performance Metrics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Razer Blade Stealth Laptop On Linux, Various Linux Laptop Performance Metrics

Earlier this year Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan announced that Razer is planning better laptop support on Linux. He noted that more customers are requesting Linux support and they formed a goal of figuring out how to make "the best notebook in the world that supports Linux." Razer doesn't have any Linux laptop announcement to make yet, but for seeing the current state of affairs, they sent over the Razer Stealth laptop so we could put it through our Linux testing paces at Phoronix. Here is a look at the Razer Stealth ultrabook on Linux as well as a variety of interesting performance metrics, including some power metrics compared to Windows.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=25128

[darkbasic]

Coreboot please.

[nrakems]

I hope they plan on bringing Nvidia Optimus support to Linux. The Nvidia Optimus "support" of today isn't even worth to be called support.

[asyn]

phoronix,

Could you test whether the eGPU is working with this laptop?

[FireBurn]

Curious to how long you've been using it for, looks filthy in that first pic

[dmitriis]

Michael, could you please do a TCP benchmark of the wireless adapter in this laptop (Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac).

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1670041

Also, not sure if you encountered that https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...x/+bug/1521173 - dmesg would be nice to look at.

It might also be worthwhile to ask them for a Razer Core and try attaching and detaching it multiple times via USB type c. Last time I tried it - it was only properly handling the first hot-plug and the rest of them have not resulted in successful device attachment.

I had the same issues with the realtek camera - it works unreliably and it is not possible to use it with anything higher than 640x480 without glitches.

Thanks for the review!

[Michael]

phoronix,

Could you test whether the eGPU is working with this laptop?

Unfortunately I have no access to any external GPU solution.

[Michael]

Curious to how long you've been using it for, looks filthy in that first pic

Two weeks although it appears the laptop was handled prior to receiving it.

[coder111]

How does the keyboard feel like? I hate the arrow key layout with tiny up/down arrows, but I guess it's hard to get better layout for 13" laptop.

Also, I wish there was Debian + XFCE in the tests. That's what I use. Honestly, not trolling here

For me, I'll wait until some decent AMD CPU/APU + dGPU laptops. Preferably Zen+Vega. Does Razer have plans to manufacture any of them any time soon? Current selection of AMD laptops is very poor- their current lineup of mobile dGPUs sucks and is next to impossible to get anything remotely high end.

[schmidtbag]

That was nice of them to send you one. I appreciate their efforts but it seems like they're off to a rough start. Requiring a Windows utility to update firmware and tweak the keyboard backlight is unacceptable, even if you're a Windows user. Other brands can get by with these things without the need of OS intervention. But, if they keep working on refining support, I'm sure these will be short-term issues.