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).
I am very intrigued by this tablet, did you ever try to dual boot Android X86 along side linux? 3years ago I could play wonderfully some nice games with HW support and take advantage of the Android ecosystem. Can you update us with a review if you can?
I have not, partly because the most recent build I've found is still Android 9.0, which uses kernel 4.x, while the Radeon 780M in Minisforum V3 requires at least kernel 6.4.
I have tried Waydroid, but the lack of full USB passthrough means I cannot login to my Google Account (due to Advanced Protection; and U2F doesn't work over HID forwarding) so I didn't test it further.
> I have not, partly because the most recent build I've found is still Android 9.0, which uses kernel 4.x, while the Radeon 780M in Minisforum V3 requires at least kernel 6.4.
Ah it's a shame the Android-X86 project seems to have entered the abandon-ware territory. But you can look into another OSS project, BlissOS (their latest release bases on A13, still kernel 6.1.x), should be fine but not everything would work seemlessly I assume.
Looks like there’s a new build with the 6.6 kernel. I’ll try this over the weekend and report back!
Edit: I just did a quick test, it seems to work pretty well. The volume control works, the camera works. So far, what doesn't seem to work is the fingerprint sensor and automatic orientation. The pen also seems to work.
- 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).