Affordable (under 550€) Linux laptops! Slimbook Elemental Review

Try the new version of Thunderbird (it’s now my email & calendar client of choice!): 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to a weekly podcast, vote on the next topics I cover, and get your name in the credits: YouTube: @thelinuxexp/join Patreon: Liberapay: Or, you can donate whatever you want: 👕 GET TLE MERCH Support the channel AND get cool new gear: 🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! 🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE: Website: Mastodon: @thelinuxEXP Pixelfed: PeerTube: Discord: #Linux #linuxlaptop #laptop #linuxdesktop #bestlaptopreview #bestlaptop 00:00 Intro 00:53 Sponsor: Thunderbird 01:46 The Specs 03:25 Design & Build Quality 05:42 Performance & Battery Life 07:38 Ports 08:24 Display 09:20 Keyboard & Touchpad 11:14 Webcam, speakers & mic 12:19 Parting Thoughts So, the Slimbook Elemental comes in 2 variants, a 14 inch and a 15.6 inch. Both come with either an i5 1235U or an i7 1255U. Both laptops have a 1080p display, matte with an anti glare coating, they both offer 2 non soldered DDR4 RAM slots, running at 3200Mhz, and one NVMe SSD slot, with PCIe4. They both use Intel’s Xe graphics, they’re both made mostly out of aluminium and they both have Wifi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, a 730P webcam, and a 49Wh battery. Both laptops are mostly build out of aluminium: the palm rest, the sides, the bottom plate, and the lid. The screen bezels and the hinge guards a made out of plastic. The i5 1235U is a low power CPU, made for ultrabooks, so it won’t blow your socks off, but it’s still pretty decent. The i7 1255U gets 2529 in single core and 6835 in multi core, which is a bit better, but not a huge difference. Both review units I got used the i7, but looking online, the i5 1235U gets around 2150 in single core, and 6500 to 7000 in multi core. Honestly, if you’re looking for an affordable device, I’d go with the i5, it’s probably more than enough for most people’s needs. As per battery life, at mid brightness, running videos in a loop in Firefox over wifi, I got 6h on both, which is OK but not spectacular for a U series CPU from Intel. The ports are a bit different on the 14 inch and the 15 inch. They both provide a HDMI ports, and a USB C 3.2 gen 2 port that supports Display Port 1.4, and charging, plus a gigabit ethernet port, an audio jack and a micro SD card slot. They also both have 1 USB 3.2 Gen 1 type A port, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 type A port, and the 15 inch adds a USB 2 port on top of that, and a sim card module if you want to use 4G / LTE on the laptop. As per the display, in both cases its 1080p, at 60hz, with a matte / anti glare coating. The viewing angles are good here, and the colors are ok, but they’re not the best displays you“ll ever see. Both laptops don’t have the same touchpads and keyboards. You do get a numpad on the 15 inch but not on the 14 inch. So, on the 15 inch, keys are super soft: they are nice and easy to press, and very stable, but the actual actuation feels very smooth, like the rubber membrane is thick underneath. I liked typing on it. It’s backlit with RGB so you can pick the color through an app like Slimbook RGB. On the 14 inch, the keyboard is really small, it doesn’t g edge to edge, meaning that it’s kinda cramped and reminiscent of netbook keyboards. It’s also backlit here, but with just white as a color. As per the touchpads, they’re your usual hinge based design, they don’t feel like glass touchpads, they’re not ultra smooth, but they do feel precise, they have a nice click, they don’t wobble or rattle. The one on the 14 inch model feels a bit more rigid, with less travel before the click, but they’re about on par with a solid PC touchpad. Now, for the webcams, they’re just 720p. They’re not terrible, they actually perform decently with various lighting conditions, but yeah, they’re not macbook quality. On the 14 inch, you actually get a built-in webcam shutter so you can hide that if you want, and both laptops have bios switches to disable the webcam and the mic if you never use them. The onboard mics aren’t noteworthy, they’re bad, like every laptop mic is, they’re tinny and they don’t sound good. The speakers on both laptops are OK, they have some amount of bass, they don’t vibrate the chassis, and they’re definitely enough to listen to music, or watch youtube, a movie or a tv show.