Review of Linux on Minisforum V3 AMD Ryzen Tablet

This is a highly intriguing device, but if it's to replace a MacBook or especially an iPad, battery life is going to have to be a great deal better. I'd be willing to sacrifice some raw muscle if that's what it takes to achieve that – even if it "only" performed as well as the original M1, that'd be more than enough if that meant also life north of the 12 hour mark.

Though it's not mentioned in the review, good standby time is also important. Not only is it irritating to find one's tablet/laptop dead when pulled out for use, the sleeping battery drain typical of x86 laptops since the advent of "modern" standby runs through your battery's cycles much more quickly than necessary.

So glad to see minis on here so I hopefully can find a receptive audience to my rant:

None of these super cheap Chinese devices come with bios or firmware support or updates.

Minisforum, topton, qotom, beelink etc all have like maybe 1 or 2 bios updates AND EVEN THAT MANY IS RARE!

In the post spectre age, just look at amd security bulletins! Every few months there’s major bios/firmware/cpu vulnerabilities

And all the tech bloggers happily continue to showcase these devices (ltt, level1techs, sth) without any mention of the bios.

People recommend them as firewalls!

Had my eye on this. Looks like such an amazing, compact, powerful system. Minisforum has been doing an amazing job with small PC systems & this is a very compelling new form factor for them to be going into. Awesome seeing such an excellent Ryzen made so mobile, on a great screen.

I'd love to see what folks can do with power tuning on it. For good or for bad there's quite the rabbit hole of options. It'd be excellent to see a write-up from a pro on undervolting & tuning the performance profiles. Seeing what kind fo gains are possible.

There's efforts like Tuned (which is replacing the abysmally limited power-profiles-daemon in Fedora https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-41-Goes-Tuned-PPD) which can get far. But there's so many different options! And it just doesn't feel like we have good shared working knowledge on what people do and especially on what the net results are.

My Minisforum V3 arrived a few days ago. I like the overall package, but there are a few things I would like to add, after using it for the past few days (running NixOS with Plasma 6):

- The screen panel QC seems very inconsistent. My unit got at least 2 dead pixels and over 6 bright pixels and a horizontal faint line across the screen, possibly caused by coating. I don't notice the dead pixels that much during the normal use due to the screen PPI being quite high (215 PPI), but it has way too many. (I'm trying to arrange a replacement with Minisforum, and JP store seems to have better support than the rest, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.)

- The overall pen experience is quite good for writing. There's no perceivable lag in Krita as far as I can tell. I would still prefer Wacom Cintiq or iPad Pro for any serious drawing/painting session (the V3 pen pressure detection doesn't feel accurate enough to me).

- Everything mostly working out of the box as of kernel 6.6 (LTS). Sleep works great. The only thing that seems broken so far is the audio, which lacks any volume control. A lot of people suggest setting pipewire to use soft-mixer, but this caused the device to be muted during the machine startup. My workaround to this is to have a soft mixer Virtual Sink in pipewire and leave the audio device as-is.

- Tablet experience is suboptional. As mentioned in the article, if you happen to use more than one language, and have to use Fcitx5 for text input, then you're likely going to manually have to switch between Maliit and Fcitx5 every time you detach a keyboard (because Plasma only allow one Virtual Keyboard to be used).

- Also, Maliit lacks Ctrl/Alt/Cursor Keys, making this very unsuitable for an emergency console during travel/transit unless you also pack a keyboard, which adds thickness/weight. At this point, ThinkPad may have been a better choice. (I'm looking into possibly adding at least arrow keys to Maliit). (Also, Maliit Japanese keyboard uses a flick layout, which is broken because Maliit also uses a downward-drag gesture to dismiss itself... so you can't type any letters that require a downward flick)

- Battery life is, as mentioned in the article, 6 hours if I use powersave with power EPP, and around 4 hours if I use powersave with balance_performance EPP. Under Linux, battery drain during sleep is only around 1-2% over 8 hours (tested by charging to full before bed and leaving it unplug).

- The touchpad experience is fine. They're not amazing, but good enough to get the job done (there are certain angles that the touchpad sensor will stop registering touch events).

It's too bad that the portable display mode doesn't support touch. That was what stopped me from getting one.

> I’ve experimented with Asahi Linux on my iMac, and while it offers a generally great experience, the ARM Linux ecosystem, especially with 16K pages, doesn’t quite meet my daily needs.

I would be interested in hearing more - I was given to believe that most open source software was fine on any of the major architectures[0], and I've not heard of the 16k thing at all (is Asahi doing something nonstandard with memory pages?)

[0] Albeit with POWER somewhat weaker and SPARC mostly lost. But I thought ARM was in good shape, and MIPS has been weirdly resilient.

The tablet looks absolutely amazing! But: does it support multi touch and palm recognition? Can it be purchased with international keyboard variants? Or is it just a prototype at this point.

They don't even mention that it's made by a Chinese company.

I was planning to buy this + nuphy keyboard for portable workstation. Maybe +egpu for home usage.

"Until recently, if I wish to do some programming in a coffee shop or during a family trip, my only options are the corporate-provisioned MacBook or my iPad Pro 2020, neither of which is ideal." - why not buy a Macbook Air? It's more or less the same price and form factor as the iPad but has a keyboard. You can get a Macbook Air M1 for around 800 USD now.