Millenium Falcon

My old netbook is currently seven years old, and shows its age : boot times up to two minutes, working in Chrome was a drag and took ages. And I'm not even talking about performing updates. All to blame on the slow CPU (never again an Atom !) and the slow hard drive. The last two occasions I used the laptop was on Config Management Days and Red Hat summit, and I can tell you the experience was unpleasant. So a new laptop was needed.

Luckily, the laptop market has reinvented itself after it collapsed during the tablet rise. Ultrabooks are now super slim, super light and extremely powerful. My new laptop needed to be :

  • fast : no Celeron or Atom chip was allowed. An i5 as minimum CPU
  • beautifull : I need a companion to my vanity. No plasticky stuff, well build and good quality.
  • well supportive for Linux : Linux would be installed, so the hardware needed to be supported
  • reasonable cheap : speaks for itself; a lot of nice ultrabooks are available, but I didn't want to pay an arm and a leg.
  • light and small : I carry this everywhere around the world, so the laptop shouldn't weigh more than 1.4kg

Soon, I saw 2 main candidates : first, the Dell XPS13 still is regarded as ultrabook king. It supports Linux nicely, and has that beautiful Infinity display. Disadvantages were that it was on the heavy side, and I wasn't fan of its design either. And a tad on the expensive side as well.

On the other side, there was the Asus Zenbook 3 (UX390) which was stunningly beautiful, had a nice screen as well and was extremely light with its 0.9 kg. However, I saw the silver variant in the shop, but found it a bit on the small side. So when I saw its 14 inch brother, UX430UQ, I was immediately sold. This is a 14 inch laptop - it is advertised as a 13inch laptop with a 14 inch screen, but don't believe that - which is as light as 1.25 kg, has a nice dark grey metal spun outerior and excellent keyboard and screen. Equipped with an i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM, it doesn't fail to deliver on the performance field. Shame that Asus doesn't provide a sleeve with this laptop, as it does with the UX390. Also, important, it doesn't has a safe lock hole, so don't leave this baby unattended.

I wiped the Windows 10 and booted the Fedora netinstall CD, but it seemed that both WiFi and trackpad were unsupported. I lost quite some time with this, but eventually decided to boot it with the Fedora LiveCD, to find out all was working out of the box. Probably the netinstall CD uses an older kernel. I baptised the laptop Millenium Falcon, as I switched to spaceship names on my hardware lately.