StarBook 7 14" Linux Laptop with Intel Core Ultra 7, 4K, Up to 96GB 5.6GHz RAM
us.starlabs.systemsHow does everyone continue to get the keyboard wrong on these?
If the left and right arrows are full-size I know it's going to be miserable to use. Probably worse than miserable, because clearly nobody who ever uses the keyboard a serious amount has actually sat down and used it, or the arrow situation would have been fixed _immediately._ Who knows what else is terrible about the keyboard, given that it was pretty obviously not seriously tested?
(I'm poking a bit of fun here, but this _is_ still a dealbreaker for me. I use those keys plenty, and full-height left/right arrows are indeed _miserable_ to use - it's basically impossible to quickly center your hand on them from home row.)
I have a keyboard that has this exact arrow key layout and… idk it’s fine? I think within a day I was completely used to it. I’m actually kind of confused what the complaint is with full height left/right. That it’s harder to locate them by touch?
I'm also confused but very interested based on this being a big enough deal to be a deal breaker. Maybe he wants them smaller ?
I think the up/down not being full size is a bigger deal but even that is not a deal breaker
There seems to be this obsession to make keyboards perfectly rectangular; never quite understood this.
That said, although I agree it's not ideal, I've generally had little difficulty adjusting to these types of weird arrow key shapes, or things like odd locations for home, end, etc.
What always bothers me is the lack of gaps on the function keys. F8 and F9 turn the brightness up and down. How are you supposed to use those on touch? You can't really, not without those gaps to guide you. Sounds like a little thing, but it's always been a pain on every laptop I've had that didn't have those gaps. This, and the physical trackpad buttons, are a big part of why I generally use ThinkPads whenever I have the chance.
What's the right design in your opinion ? super curious as I'm trying to figure out based on your comment. I have never even thought about this and I bet if it is the wrong design, it continues to be repeated for the same reason.
I guess I'm honestly wondering, who cares ? (not dismissive, what type of person/work and what design!?) fwiw I'm an eng and a big gamer so I'm constantly using keyboards and I can't remember ever caring or using those keys much.
To you, perhaps. I've used laptop keyboards with similar full height left/right arrows and adapted to it pretty quick. I certainly didn't find it miserable.
Well, speak for yourself. I have a HP ZBook and Metabox laptops with keyboard that is almost identical to that of StarBook and I am very happy with that layout. Can't stand the Mac laptop style keyboards (which makes Framework laptops a no-go for me) that lack separate home/end/pgup/pgdown keys. I will be looking for a new laptop in the next 12 months so StarBook will be on top of my list.
Hey, Odin here from Starlabs! The site is now live with the new product pics, hopefully we will be holding many Starfighters within 12 months from now. Glad your considering Starlabs, feel free to reach out to the team to answer your q's! Best Odin
If they can't get the basics right, who knows what horrors lurk under the hood.
I prefer my "h" and "l" keys to be full sized.
For any serious work I'm using hjkl.
Yeah, not great (and you can have PgUp PgDn still if you use a modern ThinkPad-style layout, let alone the never-gonna-happen-again perfect 7-row style).
Having the Home/PgUp/PgDn/End column on the right is the worst laptop layout to me though. I had a Vaio like that and even after using it as my main computer for 5 years it never ceased to annoy me that I had couldn't just put my hands down centered on the laptop, but had to shift my hands over to the left (or move the whole laptop right and tilt my head). And even Sony wasn't dumb enough to put a power button in the top right that you'll only hit by mistake when trying to delete.
hjkl :P
One note for anyone thinking of buying. Check the reddit threads. I bought their Linux Tablet last year and the delays were horrible. It was delivered 8 months later than they advertised and their comms was crap.
I quite enjoy the tablet - it's a good enough system... Out of date by the time it was delivered; however, nice enough. I wouldn't have bought it at the price point had I known it was going to be so late to deliver.
Hey, Odin here from StarLabs. I joined the team 6 weeks ago and am in charge of communications. You are spot on, most of the team answers inbound tech questions well but doesn't see online timeline queries which leads to poor comms which is why I was hired! Our production times (pre-me) were slow, and to be transparent there is little I can do until a product physically lands on my desk, only then do I get control and can ensure a product is delivered. There are steps we can do to improve this: find additional component suppliers, and possibly get funded as we are still self-funded. If you know ways we could reduce production time I would love for that to happen, it would make my life a lot easier! Best Odin
With all these desirable cookie cutter Taiwan derivative computers out on the market it really makes you wonder when we’re going start getting BestBuy/Insignia branded laptops being sold like RadioShack used to do.
I think Radio Shack had Tandy and Tandy made computers and leather working products. Does anyone know more about this?
Apparently it was the other way around: Tandy started as a hobby store and bought the tiny RadioShack brand in 1963, and spun off Tandy Leather at some point. I never knew they were founded by the same dude. My mom bought beads and supplies from Tandy Leather when I was a kid and I never made the connection to Tandy computers and Radio Shack!
5 ghz (across 8 of its 16 cores) cpu, the 5.6 is the ram.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236851/...
What do people use 96GB RAM for? It seems these days I'm happy with cookie-cutter 32 GB and longing for more VRAM that is impossible to get.
(And why on earth is there a dedicated USB 2.0 port? To trick people into plugging in a USB 3 device and getting terrible performance?)
For a regular dev laptop? I'd probably put some of ~/.cache on /tmp/cache. It's fine to clear on reboot, and putting it in memory should be a bit faster.
My ~/.cache/go is 6.2G, but it was about 25G when I cleared it out last week.
Of course you don't need* it, but that's what I'd do with 96G of RAM. My current laptop has 8G and I manage fine with that.
I use it for OpenTelemetry traces. I wrote a parser using parser-combinators so breakpoint debugging is pretty useless because the syntax is highly recursive and each parser gets invoked at nearly every character.
Using traces, I can easily run a parse, and then do things like "look at the attempt to parse a hyperlink in the 2nd paragraph after the 3rd headline" pretty trivially using the tree structure that traces naturally are in.
But, depending on the size of the document I am testing with, each execution generates 50+ GiB of traces, so to avoid putting significant wear on my SSD and to keep things snappy (both recording the traces and viewing the traces) I launch jaeger in memory-mode so the trace doesn't getting written to disk.
Also, its super nice being able to casually use /tmp as tmpfs for basically anything without worrying much about space.
Electron apps with memory leaks, corporate security scanning software, a huge nix compilation, you know, the important stuff.
Looks nice. Does anyone know how the keyboard feels compared to ThinkPad?
Hey, Odin here from Starlabs! I tried to push the website live on Friday but we didn't get the product pics in time. Sean (Foudner) pushed the updates live over the weekend, this is why its now visible. I am soon to make a few announcements across our platforms and open orders. (We haven't sold out, we haven't opened orders yet). Our ecom site displays it as "Sold out" but that's not the case, we haven't started orders yet. Hope this helps clear up some confusion. Best Odin
replied to the wrong comment, sorry
Hey, the Keyboard will be the same as the Starbook MK V and Starbook MK VI. I could possibly send over the specs sheet. Will ask Best Odin
The N200 is a fairly wimpy processor that isn’t really meant for laptops, more low-end desktops and routers, but that explains the low price.
Hey, I'm not the biggest N200 fan (No pun intended). Some people NEED battery life and want a quiet experience so this is tailored for those people, it also happens to be cheaper. We're talking about a Linux device that is cheap and would be powerful enough for a lot of the non-techies. We also needed another option as we aren't doing AMD anymore.... A lot of our Linux users typically work in tech-related jobs and move heavy files/code which is who the Ultra Core 7 model is aimed at. I would love the Ultra Core 7 but if I was a light user I'd prefer the N200 which is cheaper. Hope this helps, we aren't trying to charge super computer prices for an N200, instead just giving the free-market the option. Best Odin
The are sold out
Hey, Odin here from Starlabs! I tried to push the website live on Friday but we didn't get the product pics in time. Sean (Foudner) pushed the updates live over the weekend, this is why its now visible. I am soon to make a few announcements across our platforms and open orders. (We haven't sold out, we haven't opened orders yet). Our ecom site displays it as "Sold out" but that's not the case, we haven't started orders yet. Hope this helps clear up some confusion. Best Odin