**A Laptop Review: Linux and Windows Experiences**

I really want to live with this laptop if I need or have any questions regarding it, these solutions are really good and I had absolutely no issue kind of going through each one because there's things I messed up and just as a final note here when I messed things up here because I was editing GRUB I was coming in here trying to mess with XORG and how it renders its display all kinds of shenanigans I ended up almost bricking the device or not bricking but making it non-bootable and I was able to call them up and said hey I jacked up all the display settings what can I do to get this back to normal and I just called 800 number and got a human in California just this 800 K focus one it was amazing and the guy was extremely knowledgeable helped and said hey we have a whole set of scripts to help you get back to that default desktop space and it works phenomenal so huge shout out to their support and their solutions here use them if you get this laptop and honestly if even if you don't use this laptop it's worth checking out their GitHub and looking at their scripts because they are so involved and I'm beyond pressed with how they've set this laptop up because most Linux desktop experiences on a laptop are not good and this one is a better experience than the Windows portion and with that said let's get into Windows over on the Windows Desktop here you can see I went ahead and made a background activated and ran my regular DBloat stuff if interested and you haven't actually got a more minimal desktop like this go check out my video going over the Titus Toolbox where I actually go and show you how to actually remove like Action Center and kind of clean things up so it's a little more minimal

I will show you the system details right here you can see it registered everything all 64 gigs of memory came in just fine it was able to take the latest NVIDIA drivers from GeForce and got that 2080 Super recognized as well going over into Device Manager I was able to load everything it did not pull in stuff automatically I could definitely tell they had some specific software to where Windows Update wasn't able to recognize everything right out of the gate but using Snappy Driver Tool I was able to install almost all of this pretty seamlessly one last thing I'll show here is just its base Task Manager everything recognized great from the GPUs and I was able to run a full benchmark and with that let's jump into the Benchmarking because I did do a Geekbench on this side of things but most of the gaming and other things I did in Linux so the FPS might be a little bit lower than what you're expecting out of this box and that's just because it was going through a compatibility layer

**Benchmarking Results**

We have three different tests to go over today all these will have links in the description so you can actually bench your system versus this laptop it'll tell you how it performs and with that I'm going to let the results speak for themselves some closing thoughts here with this laptop one I love it the keyboard feels great I'm going to be using it all the time for any time I'm mobile if I'm outside of this studio or even if I'm in the studio and I just need something from my laptop this will be my daily driver it's very good it performs extremely well now I want to just leave you with this thought a lot of people are all about AMD these days and I get it but AMD is not as good as Intel in the mobile space just yet now in a year I bet I'm going to be saying something different but as of today look at this graph it tells you that they still have some ketchup to do with the 5000 series and I believe they will catch up but AMD has been notoriously shaky in the mobile realm any AMD laptop I've ever owned I have not liked and I really hope that changes and I think it will change but as of today if you're buying a laptop you're better off going with Intel

**New Layout and Studio**

I wanted to ask you what do you think of the new layout the new studio it happened right in the middle of actually filming this I did a lot of it pre-recorded and then I had to stop because I wanted to finish out my benchmarking and other things and this has taken a couple weeks to make and I decided to take a couple days and build all this out what do you think you like it I just had to do something the black tiles was killing me I was just felt like I was in a dungeon and it just feels so much lighter and I just feel great in here enough rambling I got to get out of here so again let me know your thoughts down in the comments and I'll see you in the next one

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday i want to go over the most unique laptop and one that i'll be using for many years to come and that's a bold statement because there's a lot of things that have happened in the past month or two and that's going to happen in the next year i'm obviously talking about apple m1 today that's probably has all the videos on youtube and everything but i did not go buy a macbook and the other thing is amd ryzen chips everyone's buying them they're fantastic desktop i have a 5000 series as my main daily driver that i'm running linux on and i couldn't be happier but when it comes to mobile and laptops i've always had this love hate relationship more hate than love because a lot of times i found myself wanting to be at a desktop and that's because a lot of mobile laptops are very limited you can't do much with them and they're there's not much you can tack on or add to them well this laptop i can do a lot with i actually got sent this from kubuntu focus so it's actually a linux laptop but before you click off this video i have windows running on it i have mac os running on it and of course i am leaving the stock ubuntu linux on here there's a lot to unpack in this video there's timestamps below click around where you want to go to but buckle up because there's a lot of things to show i have hardware where i've actually pulled this thing apart and added an extra drive so i have multiple hard drives in this there's multiple graphics cards in this to where there's the integrated and a 2080 super and then on top of that we have virtualization and even on top of all of that we have just an amazing assortment of tools and scripts that have been done to the actual linux that have been modified by this team that created it that is just impressed the hell out of me so with all that said let's first start with the hardware aspect we're going to go from hardware into the software and really show what's made up and then i'm going to show some unique software features and then probably put a little teaser out there for a future video which i'm just going to tell you now it's going to be pci pass-through on a laptop which is kind of crazy and i really want to utilize that 2080 super even more so than i'm doing today but with that said let's get into it now here is the hardware setup i am running right now you can see the new kubuntu focus on the left-hand side here but i wanted to go over the specs and just kind of overlay those real fast this is using an i7 10th gen eight core 16 thread processor now with the gpu you have a choice between a 2060 a 27 or a 2080 and then you also have the integrated graphics which is just a 630 intel on the graphic side of things look at the back side here you will see it can connect up to three monitors directly into it using the hdmi the display port and then also the thunderbolt 3 port as well now moving on past that you have just the standardized storage the nvme was very well done it's a samsung evo plus that was in here i added a second drive which i'm gonna go ahead and show you that real fast as you see working on this thing was super easy so happy i can't tell you the last time i had a laptop that i could rip it apart replace the stuff with it i could tell hey this was using crucial memory not some cheap knockoff and all of it was good parts in it now as far as the battery it did have a very long battery life i actually got over the marketed rate of seven hours as long as i was using linux linux actually shuts down the dedicated gpu and runs around seven eight watts so i was able to squeeze between seven and eight hours out of this it was absolutely amazing now it also has a lot of security base on this as well i had the pre-configured ub key to where when i first got this it just booted right up the boot sequence on this was amazing very clean you had to have the ub key in to even boot it and that worked great however i decided to do a dual boot situation with that hard drive i put in and put a windows and linux side by side and that way i could just dual boot using grub i set that up and had no issue so i can run windows and linux both on this laptop which is absolutely phenomenal all right i wanted to show the initial boot outside of the screen recording just so you could see what it looks like very sleek elegant and i really love the keyboard the layout how it feels but more so i can customize this however i want it and i added a custom bootloader now by default you're not going to get something like this bootloader but it's just something i added on to where i can do windows 10 or kubuntu touch and just flip between both my operating systems but since i chose the security option this obviously wasn't available out of the git it was actually booting directly off of my little ubi key that ub key will come into here and it'll say hey enter your passphrase and this has to be inserted in the computer otherwise it will not boot so let me type in my password and then it'll check to make sure that the ub key is here it'll read the response yes that's plugged in and then it'll continue the boot process this is fantastic if you have vital information on your laptop because if someone steals the laptop those types of things you want to make sure they don't have access to your information or in my case i don't want someone accessing my youtube account as that would be already logged in and some shenanigans could definitely happen so that's why i love this boot process and with that we're gonna get right on the desktop and get into this here is the linux desktop now i'll go into windows desktop and also get into benchmarkings after this but this desktop is truly unique in i've pimped it out a little bit but i'm going to just go over what comes with it you get this nice little desktop shortcuts widget you can actually flip through this kind of shows you how to get around this desktop and it goes pretty far even in the vim and cli commands as you can see so if you're a newbie coming to linux this is actually a nice way to break yourself into the terminal and just kind of get around and learn quite a bit i absolutely love this i might actually steal it and make my own little web page with all these shortcuts in it because this is just a fantastic cheat sheet now the welcome guide i really enjoy now it does come with google chrome and firefox by default i did change this over to brave as most people know it's what i use for my daily driver right now and this is just a really good three-step process the first one just kind of it goes through hey what to do with this laptop so if you don't really know how to use such a powerful laptop like this this kind of just goes through and shows you everything it can do but let's talk about some notable standouts with this laptop truly makes it unique from other laptops we already talked about the power on and decrypt where it actually is a shim between the startup of past the bios and the operating system itself so it requires you to put this key in prior to even booting which is pretty awesome it does have very simple account setups if you've ever used any kind of ubuntu distribution before very similar and it does come with something called nsync where it can do google drive dropbox and then also onedrive as well all just kind of in one spot which is great now it does have curated apps and if you're curious it actually has this right here where it just kind of goes through and lists all the different kind of apps that comes preloaded it does come a little bit heavy and there are some apps i go ahead and purge because i don't use them but it's nice that they have all these just right out of the box now to the very first really truly unique feature of this laptop its deep learning capabilities are unparalleled and i mean this in two fronts one it's very very high in performance i don't know if there's any other mobile solution that is as high of actual performer than this laptop but also the setup is only about 10 minutes to set up the entire deep learning suite to where you can just go right in here and do it so if you're doing any type of deep learning and you want a mobile solution this is the best solution you could possibly get some of the games i was going to launch in here i think it was borderlands 3 was one of those such games i did need to set some launch options mainly because hybrid solutions on linux when it comes to the gpu a lot of times it'll select the integrated gpu and not the dedicated one when running through wine but you can get around this by just doing a wine dll override right here didn't have any issue once i put this in it would always use the dedicated gpu as long as it was enabled running this command just made sure we were using that 2080 super instead of our intel chip which was very nice once i got all that figured out and going i will say in the future probably in a couple months you really won't need to do this for the most part as the new versions of proton are starting to bake in and support hybrid graphics on a mobile solution like this one now on the dedicated graphics card front if you look down in my pass tray i added this little widget and it's called prime renderer offload status when this is green i'm using my dedicated gpu meaning if i take this on battery power i'll get about that three hours of battery power but if this is disabled this actually grays out so i highly recommend this widget if you're gonna do it but to switch back and forth type nvidia and then just type in the x server settings and then you just can scroll all the way down to prime profiles and go either performance mode which is dedicated gpu enabled or intel power saving mode if you just are doing some things where you don't need to use that dedicated gpu and you want to just save on power you'd go intel for the power saving modes which would gray this box out and i talked a little bit about the dedicated gpus here and here is a good setup of that where they actually set up it on a little stand i actually grabbed the stand off amazon called vivo it's about 30 dollar stand i highly recommend doing that if you're looking for this type of setup where you don't need a desktop this is more than capable of doing a full desktop replacement now one last thing i want to kind of show you is their guided solutions this is something i thought was kind of amazing how they have at the very bottom on this screen is really where you want to live if you need or have any questions in regards this laptop coming here these solutions are really good and i had absolutely no issue kind of going through each one because there's things i messed up and just as a final note here when i messed things up here because i was editing grub i was coming in here trying to mess with xorg and how it renders its display all kinds of shenanigans i ended up almost bricking the device or not bricking but making it non-bootable and i was able to call them up and said hey i jacked up all the display settings what can i do to get this back to normal and i just called 800 number and got a human in california just this 800 k focus one it was amazing and the guy was extremely knowledgeable helped and said hey we have a whole set of scripts to help you get back to that default desktop space and it works phenomenal so huge shout out to their support and their solutions here use them if you get this laptop and honestly if even if you don't use this laptop it's worth checking out their github and looking at their scripts because they are so involved and i'm beyond pressed with how they've set this laptop up because most linux desktop experiences on a laptop are not good and this one is a better experience than the windows portion and with that said let's get into windows over on the windows desktop here you can see i went ahead and made a background activated and ran my regular d bloat stuff if interested and you haven't actually got a more minimal desktop like this go check out my video going over the titus toolbox where i actually go and show you how to actually remove like action center and kind of clean things up so it's a little more minimal i will show you the system details right here you can see it registered everything all 64 gigs of memory came in just fine it was able to take the latest nvidia drivers from geforce and got that 2080 super recognized as well going over into device manager i was able to load everything it did not pull in stuff automatically i could definitely tell they had some specific software to where windows update wasn't able to recognize everything right out of the gate but using snappy driver tool i was able to install almost all of this pretty seamlessly one last thing i'll show here is just its base task manager everything recognized great from the gpus and i was able to run a full benchmark and with that let's jump into the benchmarking because i did do a geekbench on this side of things but most the gaming and other things i did in linux so the fps might be a little bit lower than what you're expecting out of this box and that's just because it was going through a compatibility layer but with that let's get into benchmarking it's benchmarking time we have three different tests to go over today all these will have links in the description so you can actually bench your system versus this laptop it'll tell you how it performs and with that i'm going to let the results speak for themselves some closing thoughts here with this laptop one i love it the keyboard feels great i'm going to be using it all the time for any time i'm mobile if i'm outside of this studio or even if i'm in the studio and i just need something from my laptop this will be my daily driver it's very good it performs extremely well now i want to just leave you with this thought a lot of people are all about amd these days and i get it but amd is not as good as intel in the mobile space just yet now in a year i bet i'm going to be saying something different but as of today look at this graph it tells you that they still have some ketchup to do with the 5000 series and i believe they will catch up but amd has been notoriously shaky in the mobile realm any amd laptop i've ever owned i have not liked and i really hope that changes and i think it will change but as of today if you're buying a laptop you're better off going with intel and also i wanted to ask you what do you think of the new layout the new studio it happened right in the middle of actually filming this i did a lot of it pre-recorded and then i had to stop because i wanted to finish out my benchmarking and other things and this has taken a couple weeks to make and i decided to take a couple days and build all this out what do you think you like it i just had to do something the black tiles was killing me i was just felt like i was in a dungeon and it just feels so much lighter and i just feel great in here enough rambling i got to get out of here so again let me know your thoughts down in the comments and i'll see you in the next onetoday i want to go over the most unique laptop and one that i'll be using for many years to come and that's a bold statement because there's a lot of things that have happened in the past month or two and that's going to happen in the next year i'm obviously talking about apple m1 today that's probably has all the videos on youtube and everything but i did not go buy a macbook and the other thing is amd ryzen chips everyone's buying them they're fantastic desktop i have a 5000 series as my main daily driver that i'm running linux on and i couldn't be happier but when it comes to mobile and laptops i've always had this love hate relationship more hate than love because a lot of times i found myself wanting to be at a desktop and that's because a lot of mobile laptops are very limited you can't do much with them and they're there's not much you can tack on or add to them well this laptop i can do a lot with i actually got sent this from kubuntu focus so it's actually a linux laptop but before you click off this video i have windows running on it i have mac os running on it and of course i am leaving the stock ubuntu linux on here there's a lot to unpack in this video there's timestamps below click around where you want to go to but buckle up because there's a lot of things to show i have hardware where i've actually pulled this thing apart and added an extra drive so i have multiple hard drives in this there's multiple graphics cards in this to where there's the integrated and a 2080 super and then on top of that we have virtualization and even on top of all of that we have just an amazing assortment of tools and scripts that have been done to the actual linux that have been modified by this team that created it that is just impressed the hell out of me so with all that said let's first start with the hardware aspect we're going to go from hardware into the software and really show what's made up and then i'm going to show some unique software features and then probably put a little teaser out there for a future video which i'm just going to tell you now it's going to be pci pass-through on a laptop which is kind of crazy and i really want to utilize that 2080 super even more so than i'm doing today but with that said let's get into it now here is the hardware setup i am running right now you can see the new kubuntu focus on the left-hand side here but i wanted to go over the specs and just kind of overlay those real fast this is using an i7 10th gen eight core 16 thread processor now with the gpu you have a choice between a 2060 a 27 or a 2080 and then you also have the integrated graphics which is just a 630 intel on the graphic side of things look at the back side here you will see it can connect up to three monitors directly into it using the hdmi the display port and then also the thunderbolt 3 port as well now moving on past that you have just the standardized storage the nvme was very well done it's a samsung evo plus that was in here i added a second drive which i'm gonna go ahead and show you that real fast as you see working on this thing was super easy so happy i can't tell you the last time i had a laptop that i could rip it apart replace the stuff with it i could tell hey this was using crucial memory not some cheap knockoff and all of it was good parts in it now as far as the battery it did have a very long battery life i actually got over the marketed rate of seven hours as long as i was using linux linux actually shuts down the dedicated gpu and runs around seven eight watts so i was able to squeeze between seven and eight hours out of this it was absolutely amazing now it also has a lot of security base on this as well i had the pre-configured ub key to where when i first got this it just booted right up the boot sequence on this was amazing very clean you had to have the ub key in to even boot it and that worked great however i decided to do a dual boot situation with that hard drive i put in and put a windows and linux side by side and that way i could just dual boot using grub i set that up and had no issue so i can run windows and linux both on this laptop which is absolutely phenomenal all right i wanted to show the initial boot outside of the screen recording just so you could see what it looks like very sleek elegant and i really love the keyboard the layout how it feels but more so i can customize this however i want it and i added a custom bootloader now by default you're not going to get something like this bootloader but it's just something i added on to where i can do windows 10 or kubuntu touch and just flip between both my operating systems but since i chose the security option this obviously wasn't available out of the git it was actually booting directly off of my little ubi key that ub key will come into here and it'll say hey enter your passphrase and this has to be inserted in the computer otherwise it will not boot so let me type in my password and then it'll check to make sure that the ub key is here it'll read the response yes that's plugged in and then it'll continue the boot process this is fantastic if you have vital information on your laptop because if someone steals the laptop those types of things you want to make sure they don't have access to your information or in my case i don't want someone accessing my youtube account as that would be already logged in and some shenanigans could definitely happen so that's why i love this boot process and with that we're gonna get right on the desktop and get into this here is the linux desktop now i'll go into windows desktop and also get into benchmarkings after this but this desktop is truly unique in i've pimped it out a little bit but i'm going to just go over what comes with it you get this nice little desktop shortcuts widget you can actually flip through this kind of shows you how to get around this desktop and it goes pretty far even in the vim and cli commands as you can see so if you're a newbie coming to linux this is actually a nice way to break yourself into the terminal and just kind of get around and learn quite a bit i absolutely love this i might actually steal it and make my own little web page with all these shortcuts in it because this is just a fantastic cheat sheet now the welcome guide i really enjoy now it does come with google chrome and firefox by default i did change this over to brave as most people know it's what i use for my daily driver right now and this is just a really good three-step process the first one just kind of it goes through hey what to do with this laptop so if you don't really know how to use such a powerful laptop like this this kind of just goes through and shows you everything it can do but let's talk about some notable standouts with this laptop truly makes it unique from other laptops we already talked about the power on and decrypt where it actually is a shim between the startup of past the bios and the operating system itself so it requires you to put this key in prior to even booting which is pretty awesome it does have very simple account setups if you've ever used any kind of ubuntu distribution before very similar and it does come with something called nsync where it can do google drive dropbox and then also onedrive as well all just kind of in one spot which is great now it does have curated apps and if you're curious it actually has this right here where it just kind of goes through and lists all the different kind of apps that comes preloaded it does come a little bit heavy and there are some apps i go ahead and purge because i don't use them but it's nice that they have all these just right out of the box now to the very first really truly unique feature of this laptop its deep learning capabilities are unparalleled and i mean this in two fronts one it's very very high in performance i don't know if there's any other mobile solution that is as high of actual performer than this laptop but also the setup is only about 10 minutes to set up the entire deep learning suite to where you can just go right in here and do it so if you're doing any type of deep learning and you want a mobile solution this is the best solution you could possibly get some of the games i was going to launch in here i think it was borderlands 3 was one of those such games i did need to set some launch options mainly because hybrid solutions on linux when it comes to the gpu a lot of times it'll select the integrated gpu and not the dedicated one when running through wine but you can get around this by just doing a wine dll override right here didn't have any issue once i put this in it would always use the dedicated gpu as long as it was enabled running this command just made sure we were using that 2080 super instead of our intel chip which was very nice once i got all that figured out and going i will say in the future probably in a couple months you really won't need to do this for the most part as the new versions of proton are starting to bake in and support hybrid graphics on a mobile solution like this one now on the dedicated graphics card front if you look down in my pass tray i added this little widget and it's called prime renderer offload status when this is green i'm using my dedicated gpu meaning if i take this on battery power i'll get about that three hours of battery power but if this is disabled this actually grays out so i highly recommend this widget if you're gonna do it but to switch back and forth type nvidia and then just type in the x server settings and then you just can scroll all the way down to prime profiles and go either performance mode which is dedicated gpu enabled or intel power saving mode if you just are doing some things where you don't need to use that dedicated gpu and you want to just save on power you'd go intel for the power saving modes which would gray this box out and i talked a little bit about the dedicated gpus here and here is a good setup of that where they actually set up it on a little stand i actually grabbed the stand off amazon called vivo it's about 30 dollar stand i highly recommend doing that if you're looking for this type of setup where you don't need a desktop this is more than capable of doing a full desktop replacement now one last thing i want to kind of show you is their guided solutions this is something i thought was kind of amazing how they have at the very bottom on this screen is really where you want to live if you need or have any questions in regards this laptop coming here these solutions are really good and i had absolutely no issue kind of going through each one because there's things i messed up and just as a final note here when i messed things up here because i was editing grub i was coming in here trying to mess with xorg and how it renders its display all kinds of shenanigans i ended up almost bricking the device or not bricking but making it non-bootable and i was able to call them up and said hey i jacked up all the display settings what can i do to get this back to normal and i just called 800 number and got a human in california just this 800 k focus one it was amazing and the guy was extremely knowledgeable helped and said hey we have a whole set of scripts to help you get back to that default desktop space and it works phenomenal so huge shout out to their support and their solutions here use them if you get this laptop and honestly if even if you don't use this laptop it's worth checking out their github and looking at their scripts because they are so involved and i'm beyond pressed with how they've set this laptop up because most linux desktop experiences on a laptop are not good and this one is a better experience than the windows portion and with that said let's get into windows over on the windows desktop here you can see i went ahead and made a background activated and ran my regular d bloat stuff if interested and you haven't actually got a more minimal desktop like this go check out my video going over the titus toolbox where i actually go and show you how to actually remove like action center and kind of clean things up so it's a little more minimal i will show you the system details right here you can see it registered everything all 64 gigs of memory came in just fine it was able to take the latest nvidia drivers from geforce and got that 2080 super recognized as well going over into device manager i was able to load everything it did not pull in stuff automatically i could definitely tell they had some specific software to where windows update wasn't able to recognize everything right out of the gate but using snappy driver tool i was able to install almost all of this pretty seamlessly one last thing i'll show here is just its base task manager everything recognized great from the gpus and i was able to run a full benchmark and with that let's jump into the benchmarking because i did do a geekbench on this side of things but most the gaming and other things i did in linux so the fps might be a little bit lower than what you're expecting out of this box and that's just because it was going through a compatibility layer but with that let's get into benchmarking it's benchmarking time we have three different tests to go over today all these will have links in the description so you can actually bench your system versus this laptop it'll tell you how it performs and with that i'm going to let the results speak for themselves some closing thoughts here with this laptop one i love it the keyboard feels great i'm going to be using it all the time for any time i'm mobile if i'm outside of this studio or even if i'm in the studio and i just need something from my laptop this will be my daily driver it's very good it performs extremely well now i want to just leave you with this thought a lot of people are all about amd these days and i get it but amd is not as good as intel in the mobile space just yet now in a year i bet i'm going to be saying something different but as of today look at this graph it tells you that they still have some ketchup to do with the 5000 series and i believe they will catch up but amd has been notoriously shaky in the mobile realm any amd laptop i've ever owned i have not liked and i really hope that changes and i think it will change but as of today if you're buying a laptop you're better off going with intel and also i wanted to ask you what do you think of the new layout the new studio it happened right in the middle of actually filming this i did a lot of it pre-recorded and then i had to stop because i wanted to finish out my benchmarking and other things and this has taken a couple weeks to make and i decided to take a couple days and build all this out what do you think you like it i just had to do something the black tiles was killing me i was just felt like i was in a dungeon and it just feels so much lighter and i just feel great in here enough rambling i got to get out of here so again let me know your thoughts down in the comments and i'll see you in the next one\n"