Goodbye GNOME, goodbye desktop: the ONE DEVICE KDE setup! (InfinityBook Pro 16 gen 8)

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#Linux #kdeplasma #laptop

00:00 Intro 01:11 The Old Setup 02:50 The New Setup 05:07 The laptop: InfinityBook Pro 16 08:22 KDE Configuration for Laptop Mode 11:02 Wayland + KDE + Nvidia: not perfect 12:39 Editing Setup (dock and peripherals) 15:09 KDE Configuration for Editing Mode 17:54 Performance: editing and gaming 19:59 Parting Thoughts

So, let's look at the laptop, the Tuxedo Infinitybook pro 16, generation 8. It's 16 inches, 2560x1600, 16:10, at 240hz. It uses an Intel i7 13700H, with 32gigs of DDR5 RAM at 4800mhz, an nvidia RTX 4060 with 8 gigs of vRAM, a 500 gigs SSD (Samsung 980 Pro, PCIe4)

There's an SD card reader, a USB C port with displayport, plugged into the nvidia GPU, 1 thunderbolt 4, linked to the integrated intel GPU with power delivery, plus 2 USB A ports, an HDMI 2.0 port, and a headphone jack.

It embarks an 80 Wh battery, which gives me about 8h of battery life when using it to write scripts using wifi, and about 3 and half hours of video editing. I run this laptop using Tuxedo OS, the default distro Tuxedo installs on their devices.

I created a laptop power profile, it drops the brightness to 35%, and it's limited to 4 logical cores, at 1.4 Ghz. It might seem low, but it's the sweet spot for what I do. I created a KDE activity for this mode, in which I have a nice colorful wallpaper, and the widgets I need when I'm writing scripts.

The first one is the weather, the second one is a sticky note. I also have a disk usage monitor, and a tracker for my Nextcloud instance and my podcast, just showing me if they're currently working OK.

Which leads me to the editing setup. I created another power profile in Tuxedo Control center, called "editing". This one cranks everything up to the max: the CPU cores, the max clock speeds, the display brightness... I use a USB C dock, namely, the steam deck dock here, to which I gave a haircut so the little rubber adapter would fit well into the laptop even when closed.

Through it, I have Ethernet, plus an HDMI cable to the display, & the various USB peripherals, some of them using a USB hub.

And in terms of the KDE setup for editing, I have a dedicated activity. It's titled "editing", and it has a black and white wallpaper, plus some performance monitors: one for the CPU, one for the RAM, one for the disk space, and one for the Nvidia GPU VRAM.

I also have a folder view widget to display the contents of my video folder, so I can get quick access. This is all complimented by my plasma panel, which has that show desktop button at the bottom left, so I can quickly peek at these sensors. I have a Places widget, a centered task bar, because on a ultrawide display you don't want these stuck all the way to the left, and then to the right the notifications, the clock, and a user applet to log out and restart the computer.

I don't use a menu: I just mapped Krunner to use the super key, and I start everything using Krunner instead.

The taskbar isn't the best here, as it can't use intellihide: I'd like it to be always visible except when a window covers it, but all it can do is "windows can cover", which isn't exactly the same thing, as it sometimes doesn't pop back up, and sometimes you get this weird half masked taskbar as well.

Use KDE file picker in Firefox: go to about:config, and set widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal=1 instead of 2.

I'm happy to report it's actually faster than my desktop. It's probably a combination of the faster RAM, newer generation Nvidia GPU, way faster CPU, and faster PCIe4 storage, but all in all, thumbnails in the timeline are generated extremely fast, Resolve never struggles to load any clip and preview it, and rendering takes less time as well.

The total war Warhammer 3 benchmark gave me 60FPS at medium settings and the native resolution of my ultrawide, which is better performance than what I got on my editing PC.

Darktide got a stable 60FPS at the native resolution of the display, with medium graphics, with DLSS on balanced.