New Laptop, Arch and Cinnamon.

Recently I purchased the unstoppable Optimus V, it's a PC Specialist machine and WOAHHH - it's fantastic.

Anyway, some of the cool features of this beast include:-

12GB ram
122GB SSD
1TB HDD
17.3 in screen
i7 with 8 cores
dual graphics:-
NVIDIA gtx860m
intel 4600 graphics
1920x1080 resolution
Oh did I mention SOUNDBLASTER?

Yes this machine is epic,

As always I installed Arch Linux, completely wiping windows 8.1 due to it being a pile of corporate doo doo.

Firstly I ventured into the usual awesome with the most basic stuff on there. But I felt a bit underwhelmed. I couldn't for the life of me get xbindkeys to register my multimedia keys and in the end I just gave up. I tried to install Manjaro Plasma 5 but Nouveau is so utterly sh*te (that's how angry it made the Christian) that every time I tried to load it it would crash, and if I ever managed to get to the install I got UEFI errors, I was sorely vexed.

I ended up reinstalling Arch, I tried Plasma 5 and got conflicts at install, so I decided to go with Cinnamon - good decision on my part.


The install worked like a charm, I installed GDM for my display manager, and the NVIDIA proprietary driver, bumblebee, and researched about how to activate it (primusrun. optimusrun etc)

Games work great, probably a little slower than windows, but not obviously. For instance, I get around 50-60 fps on WoW running at medium, and 45-60 in Ultra. Second Life gives me 60 fps on Ultra - which is unbelievable. The simple truth is, this is the fastest machine I have ever used, it takes ONE SECOND to run firefox - ONE SECOND!! On my old machine which (granted), was old..it took 10-15 seconds.

About a year and a half ago I spent 200 pounds on a brand new Toshiba laptop, it was literally slower than the PC I was trying to upgrade - thank you AMD. I installed windows and linux and both crawled, I could barely even view 720p video.

Compare it to this, it runs everything you throw at it, Steam, 1080p, 4K, without a hesitation. This is a gaming computer but it does everything brilliantly.

Cinnamon has come a long way as well. About 4 months ago I called Cinnamon "gnome widgets". I disagree now, I have no issue with Cinnamon anymore, it's matured and is a desktop in it's own right. It caters to my every whim. Happy Chris.

I bought my machine on finance, £45 a month for 2 years, in two years this will still be doing everything I want it to. I can imagine this machine will be able to serve me for many years after that.

Did I mention the 17.3in screen??!

Comments

Raymond said…
This sounds like a really awesome set up. I'm looking to get a new one myself. I totally agree with you on Arch Linux, I would have done the same! The finance deal seems a really good price and as you said it will probably serve you for years to come! The display sounds brilliant too, what a very good find!

Raymond @ CKS Global Solutions LTD

Popular Posts