I bought one of these last year, specifically looking for a modern take on the netbook form factor. I run PopOS on mine and absolutely love the machine. It’s a perfect travel laptop and it has largely replaced the iPad mini that I previously used as my travel companion. I sometimes use it with XReal glasses, which is great. I’ve found that a 35 watt phone charger is sufficient to charge it over USB C, so I don’t even need to carry a laptop-class charging brick.
I will note that I also had the screen rotation issue described in the post, but it was easy to solve at the desktop environment level in COSMIC. I didn’t bother dealing with it elsewhere because I honestly don’t mind if the grub menu is sideways.
The Minibook X is obviously targeted at the netbook form factor in the traditional sense, i.e. small and cheap. If you're like me and appreciate the netbook/UMPC form factors (for travel purposes in my case) but also need better specs to actually get any work done -- and you're willing to fork out a bit more to get that -- I would recommend looking at GPD's Pocket and MicroPC series. I own both a Pocket 4 and MicroPC 2 with Linux on them, and I'm quite satisfied. The only issue I've noticed is the same screen rotation quirk described here, for which the same workarounds apply.
This is the primary reason the Minibook X won out in my searches: It's the only small device that has a keyboard layout that puts all of the keys in the right spots.
They're sometimes an odd size, but when I hit the wrong key due to a sizing constraint, I don't even have to think: Backspace, hit the right key with mildly adjusted positioning.
I've tried a few machines with different layouts, and that's never the case - and having to stop and look at the keyboard to find a key interrupts flow in the worst kind of way.
I miss my Sony Vaio P series which fitted in a similar sort of niche, the cellphone radio made it just by far the best laptop I've ever used. Modern laptops don't seem to have provision for a LTE/5G radio which always confuses me a bit, in this form factor it would be ideal. I'm surprised nobody has cloned this actually, with phone screens being the right aspect ratio it seems obvious.
I had a thinkpad at one point that had a slot, but because it wasn't optioned for it you had to patch the BIOS or it wouldn't boot with anything in the slot, it seemed so hostile as to be worthless.
I got Vaio P many years after the fact and it was so neat. Alas, the PowerVR gpu Intel included on many of the chips there is quite quite problematic for anything but basic use. Although it just saw more work recently! https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-GMA500-Driver-In-2026
I think it was a year or two latter I got a Chuwi Lapbook 12.3, which was a great machine. Lovely 3:2 screen off the Surface Pro, again a pretty good Intel small-core set-up, decent ram, ok SSD, all so cheap. Great metal case. Lovely machine, at such a great price. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Chuwi-LapBook-12-3-Celeron-2K-...
I somehow managed to get it working in 2016 with a lot of hackery, I'd still have it as a usable device if the weird little pouch cells it had didn't die, repacking those batteries seemed like enough of a fire hazard I just didn't bother.
I love small laptops but this thing would really benefit from a better processor. It's about 4x slower than the Snapdragon 8 elite, a 2 year old smartphone chip.
I think the "net" does a lot of heavy lifting for a box like this - e.g. you do all the important work on a remote server, and only do basic maintenance work on the laptop itself.
It'd be so lovely if these phones & systems could run Linux. Man. Such a pity.
PostmarketOS has a small handful of Snapdragon 870, 865 tablets (~5 year old, Cortex-A77). But it feels like it's by hook & by crook. Meanwhile it feels like bootloaders are just getting more and more locked down, making it less interesting whether mainline Linux support developers or not.
Are the specifications listed in the article reliable?
It's difficult to trust them, considering Chuwi has a history of misrepresenting CPU specifications.
I have this laptop, and it is amongst the best laptops I have ever owned, despite being awful in many ways. It has almost completely replaced my use of my M4 Macbook Pro, simply because I always have it with me. That, and it can run Linux.
I don't share the complaints of the OP about the keyboard or the screen, though. The keyboard is fine, I can hit about 110WPM on it, slower than my regular pace, but enough that there's no dramas. The layout is great: Occasionally there's keys that are too small (looking at you, apostrophe) but everything is at least in the right spot, which is way more important.
The 2K display at 10" is high enough DPI that everything is totally crisp, and you can unlock ~95Hz (bad for video, good for everything else) with a bit of a tweak. You can also smash a byte into the EC at the correct offset and access the full unrestricted BIOS -- mostly to crank the RAM up to 4800MT/s.
I'm running vanilla Arch with Niri and Noctalia, and it's a dream. It's my primary dev machine, used in combination with a remote server with a tonne more grunt. If it broke tomorrow, I'd buy another - and I wouldn't do that with my macbook.
The cause is just that the panel is mounted rotated on the device. It's supposed to be used in a tablet where the top is the short end and the side is the long end, opposite to a laptop.
Lots of 15.6" Windows laptops come with 1080p screen which is painful to look at.
I will note that I also had the screen rotation issue described in the post, but it was easy to solve at the desktop environment level in COSMIC. I didn’t bother dealing with it elsewhere because I honestly don’t mind if the grub menu is sideways.
They're sometimes an odd size, but when I hit the wrong key due to a sizing constraint, I don't even have to think: Backspace, hit the right key with mildly adjusted positioning.
I've tried a few machines with different layouts, and that's never the case - and having to stop and look at the keyboard to find a key interrupts flow in the worst kind of way.
https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/2014/10/03/9f923860-4b47-11e4-b6...
My T14 has even a dedicated slot for a SIM card.
I think it was a year or two latter I got a Chuwi Lapbook 12.3, which was a great machine. Lovely 3:2 screen off the Surface Pro, again a pretty good Intel small-core set-up, decent ram, ok SSD, all so cheap. Great metal case. Lovely machine, at such a great price. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Chuwi-LapBook-12-3-Celeron-2K-...
16GB ram is cool though.
PostmarketOS has a small handful of Snapdragon 870, 865 tablets (~5 year old, Cortex-A77). But it feels like it's by hook & by crook. Meanwhile it feels like bootloaders are just getting more and more locked down, making it less interesting whether mainline Linux support developers or not.
I don't share the complaints of the OP about the keyboard or the screen, though. The keyboard is fine, I can hit about 110WPM on it, slower than my regular pace, but enough that there's no dramas. The layout is great: Occasionally there's keys that are too small (looking at you, apostrophe) but everything is at least in the right spot, which is way more important.
The 2K display at 10" is high enough DPI that everything is totally crisp, and you can unlock ~95Hz (bad for video, good for everything else) with a bit of a tweak. You can also smash a byte into the EC at the correct offset and access the full unrestricted BIOS -- mostly to crank the RAM up to 4800MT/s.
I'm running vanilla Arch with Niri and Noctalia, and it's a dream. It's my primary dev machine, used in combination with a remote server with a tonne more grunt. If it broke tomorrow, I'd buy another - and I wouldn't do that with my macbook.
To the OP:
* Accelerometer support, EC-byte-bashing to get BIOS unlock: https://github.com/greymouser/minibook-x-tools
* 95Hz EDID fix: https://github.com/sonnyp/linux-minibook-x/issues/7#issuecom...
Getting from zero to a fully working OS was a mild journey, but I'd do it again.