 Just a few weeks ago, I published a little video introducing to this device the Kubuntu Focus NX. Now, I want to do a more in-depth review of actually using this thing and giving you methods on using it. So to do that, I wasn't too sure where to start, because obviously the introduction to the device I had done in the previous video, which I suggest you that you check out if you're interested in it. Still, nonetheless, I will repeat some of the stuff that was in the other video, such as the specifications, obviously. But I still was slightly confused on where to start. So at the end, I decided to start from the actual workflows that the Kubuntu Focus team proposes to the users via guided solutions. So with our guided solutions very quickly, when you actually boot for the first time into the computer, you will see that there are some pre-installed applications, which I've talked about last time. But there are some workflows that they suggest. One workflow might be, as an example, changing your theme so that it adapts to your taste is better. And they actually have this list of guides that goes from that, like theming, to also using complex applications, such as blenders. And they also have introductions to blender videos embedded into the guide. Of course, taking from other people on YouTube with credits and everything, obviously. The first one I tried out was actually syncing locally to my Google Drive folder, which is something that is also asked in the installation menu, in the installation process. The application for this is in sync. It comes out of the box if you want it. And you can just log in with your Google account or OneDrive and then select a folder and everything will be automatically synced locally from your Google Drive folder. It worked very nicely and it was very nice to actually see it out of the box. If you don't know how to use the tool, then there's actually the whole page explaining how to go through step, even though it's pretty intuitive. And if anything goes wrong, each one of these pages I'm going to talk about actually has a troubleshooting section at the end, which also was very nice to see. This was actually my very first time syncing my Google Drive locally because I never really thought about it. So the fact that it was in front of my face actually helped me get out of my comfort zone and actually set up this thingy that was super easy to set up, but I never really took the time to do it. Now I drive it, I like it, it's nice to have. Something very similarly goes for the back-upping, doing back-ups. That is again enabled out of the box and that is again something that I usually never deal with, even though I probably should. So it takes snapshots at the very regular times and then deletes the older ones to only keep some like one every day as an example. You can see these are the back-ups that it has done by computer automatically in the last few days. I can even manually do some right now. You can see that I added some files through time, so it works nicely and I can restore previous snapshots. I can also, although I couldn't test this, couldn't test this because I don't have a large hard drive with me, take a snapshot to an external hard drive, which makes very much sense. It's something that I guess I should do. Now how to do that is again very nicely documented into the page, again with troubleshooting steps if anything goes wrong. So a very nice experience from this workflow as well. There are also two guides on how to set up Windows 10 and Windows 11 emulation inside of Linux because it might be if you're a professional that you do need some tools or to test some things in Windows Virtual Machine. And then there's also a bunch of guides which I found particularly interesting on how to work with KD Plasma out of the box. As an example it tells you how to change the theme, which is very nice. And it's something that we very much take for granted at KDE, so the fact that somebody closer to the actual user takes time to make a nice guide with troubleshooting steps if anything goes wrong for the user is something very much appreciated and probably something that KDE itself should do, but currently we don't. There's also, and I always find this kind of funny, a guide on how to set up your panel if you mess it up because obviously KDE Plasma is one of the few operating system desktops that allows you to go to the major panel and if you do a disaster you can always right-click, remove the panel and then add a new one from stock. Again this is from KD's side of things, not really documented anywhere, so the fact that Kubuntu focus took time to do a page explaining how to do this was very nice to see. So what you should take out of this section is that when you're buying this hardware you're also buying a series of workflows and guides and troubleshooting steps that comes just with it. Let me do some lighter criticism just for funny, but I have to say I am a KDE contributor, I contribute to KDE, I've done some merge requests to KDE, many, and two of those which I'm particularly proud of are the fact that I made the default panel more transparent and blurry because it looks better, more modern obviously, and I also made sure that the icons on the right hand of the panel are a bit smaller using margin separators so that the icon sizes are more consistent and look prettier. Now as you also know of course distros can choose whatever defaults to ship with and they don't necessarily have to follow what we said as a default from KDE and both Kubuntu does this, it changes some of the defaults and also the Kubuntu focus team which has done these devices has changed a bit the image as an example, heading the widget on the desktop that I've talked about last time. Now I'm not exactly sure if this is about the Kubuntu step or the Kubuntu focus step but both of these very important for me patches has been turned off by default so you don't get any transparency and blurriness out of the box and you do not get the nicely sized icons that I like on the right of the panel. Now this really isn't an actual criticism because this is KDE Plasma, it literally took three clicks to revert to blurriness and three other clicks to get the merge in areas back. It's KDE Plasma, it's meant to be customizable but I just wanted to share this personal anecdote, my poor merge requests. Okay, so what have I done with these devices in the last days? So firstly I've actually registered my podcast in it, I have a podcast and in this case it was very nice to see that a lot of applications in this regard come out of the box. As an example, registering podcast I use Audacity, obviously Audacity comes out of the box. It is the latest stable version from Ubuntu stable, which means that it's not exactly the latest Audacity version, I actually decided to install the very latest from the Flatpak but still the fact that I could just boot the device and be productive just like that without having to install usually like five or six applications was very nice. Another example, OBS was out of the box and I did some recording on this device, even the one that you're seeing right now and the fact that it was out of the box was very much appreciated. If I have to find a niche pick but it really has to like searching for me, OBS I think out of the box did not have any type of GPU acceleration enabled even if in this case you don't have like you just have an integrated GPU as we'll see later on but still it does provide some it takes some weight off from the CPU makes things a little bit easier but to be fully honest there's I haven't ever met a single devices that came with OBS with GPU support out of the box that actually worked so I can understand that. I've also done 4k video editing with this thing and in fact this is a 4k video that I'm currently editing on this machine so right now I will insert a screencap of showing you how it actually performs and then allow me to get into another more personal anecdote which is I tried of course to do KD development on this thing this is my usual workload and this is sadly where I had the most issues and not because Kubuntu focus somehow because of KDE. So I've actually contributed for KDE for two, three years more than that and I've built KDE Plasmaforms from source since the very beginning I never had like big issues but somehow in this very last weeks KDE building difficulty has gone crazy up I don't know what has happened but usually you do have some packages that Ubuntu because this is based on Ubuntu obviously doesn't have in its stable version usually you just have to like add the more the development version of Ubuntu and then get just those packages from there and it works. This time I also had to manually build some of those packages myself because they were required to be newer than even the development version of Ubuntu which seems like a lot and even after doing that still things still didn't work for some reason as an example I don't know why but I still was on KDE frameworks 5.28 which in theory should have been handled by KDE source build I'm very confused about this so I wasn't actually able to build KDE Plasma desktop not because of this device but because of KDE in the last week I don't know what has happened honestly however in this my attempt to build Plasma desktop I have built around 70 packages from source from the various KDE projects and we'll see later the more performance more in-depth performance of this thingy but as a user experience this was absolutely on par with my other devices such as the Dell XPS which has a i7 core whereas this is an i5. Okay now let's quickly go through the actual specs to see how good the device is now this machine in particular comes with a core i5 1135G7 with an URIS XE 80EU which is the base model you can also buy a core i7 11 generation 65G7 with an URIS XE 96EU the base model has a 8 gigabyte 3200 megahertz mono channel RAM but you can upgrade it to up to 64 gigabytes and anything from 16 gigabytes is dual channel the base model just has a 250 gigabytes samsung NVMe which can go up to two terabytes you can also get a secondary ss disk from 500 gigabytes to four terabytes when you buy this you can choose whether you want no encryption or full in full encryption for the disk and you can also for 120 dollars get a ubike 5 NFC you also do get bluetooth version 5.2 integrated so out of the box and both wifi 6 up to 2.4 gigabytes per second and ethernet you have ports both on the back and on the front for easier cable management on the front you do have a thunderbolt 3 usb c a usb a 3.2 gen 2 a 2 in 1 audio and on the side as the memory card reader on the back instead we see power input obviously then a mini display port 14 the ethernet port 2 usb a 3.2 gen 2 another usb thunderbolt 3 and hdmi 2.0 b the chassis is a intel nuke fanter canyon it has like metal and plastic surfaces you've seen the pictures is it has an integrated head sink a bios controlled fence we'll get to that and the main components so storage and memory are accessible just via unscrewing for phillips screws so how is actual performance so i've run a geek bank and these are the results and they're actually pretty much competing with my other devices so currently for now the kid is limb book which has a rise in seven and the dal xbs with its high seven i've also done this other test which is compiling the linux kernel i found that funny and you can see that this is how this computer performed and this is how it stacks against other cpus for reference now finally enough open benchmark open benchmark calls this under average but low tire but um yeah this isn't really representative of all the cpus it's more like all the high-end cpus so this was the piece model this is not going to be a like a server machine but you know it is rather high end for most tasks for most people you know what you need regarding the fan i actually put it to like the maximum has a test and i also put to maximum performance obviously during this test and this is the sound that my phone actually registered in from the distance that i usually sit from this computer so it should kind of be representative as soon as i started compiling obviously the fan started firing but that's pretty normal and honestly it wasn't that big of an issue you do hear the fans but you know that that's the whole point you can customize the fan behavior from the bios you can see here the settings i've also measured temperature after like hours of compiling as a test i run like i started building and compiling kd projects any kd project that were actually that was compiling just as a test and after some hours and temperature were in between around 80 sometimes reaching 90 as a maximum and finally another very good thing about this device is that it supports the intel p state which means that if you open up the brightness battery and brightness applet you do see the option to switch between performance or balanced or battery life which in this case is not battery life obviously but it was nice to see see this out of the box because other machines that don't support this have to implement their own settings their own applet in this case it just supports intel p state out of the box which is extra nice some final words regarding the support which was very good throughout this video as an example in the last video i read some criticism towards the installer regarding some steps that were not very intuitive as an example you like asked the computer to do something and it it did seem like it ignored you but that was only for 30 seconds whilst it was doing some work in the background and just after a few days of that they fixed the bug immediately and they pushed out an update to avoid that so that bug that i talked about in the last video is not there anymore now it actually waits for the previous step to end before going into the next step and it actually shows up up before like whilst you are waiting for the background jobs to finish which is very nice i can also confirm that i've kept seeing like work regarding the bugs that affect this device that are related to kd and so not due to the cuban to focus themselves of course they raised the bug and they're still doing like bounties for kd lovers that are working on this kind of bugs so they are very active in actually contributing to the whole environment and this is a really important point that i made in the last video i just want to reiterate here reiterate reiterate it here with this device you're not just buying the device this is something that actually helps the whole community to grow around it which is particularly nice the next things that i'm going to do with this device is trying to build kd plusba on it i still don't know what's up with that as soon as i do that i can actually you know see how kd plusma master works on the device but of course when you do that you're going to untest it and unstable territory what this came out of the box with i found no issue with i mean they removed my merge requests which was i'm just kidding it was nice so as always the point really of this device is not just the workout of the box but also they have good support very good support they also have like all the guides around it that help you they have pre-installed apps and they have actually tested this application to work with this specific configuration their whole idea is to make sure that they have one image for the device but that one image works nicely and without bugs and i have met i haven't met any so yeah it works and not only that but not just the experience you have they also are able thanks to all of this to give back to the kd community so the more i discovered about the kubuntu focus initiative the more honestly things like it seems like a generally good initiative that is working i don't know what else to say it just works