Hey, folks. I wanted to share my findings about the Star Labs StarBook 7 (AKA mk7 AKA mark vii). I’ve been daily driving this laptop for about 6 months.
Hardware
- Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 165H × 22
- 32.0 GiB memory
- 1TB storage
Display
I have historically been against hidpi displays for laptop because they just don’t work 100% of the time on Linux. No matter how many brittle workarounds I’ve applied, hidpi displays have always hurt more than helped.
However, the StarBook 7 laptop absolutely nailed the display resolution. 3840x2160 is perfect for 2x integer scaling. When I ran Arch, I never ran into an app that was tiny or blurry. From Bitwarden to Claws Mail to Reaper. I’m happy to report everything worked fine. The ONLY app I was able to find that looked blurry was Cambalache for GNOME dev. All of this with ZERO workarounds, ZERO tweaks. It Just Works.
This has been the best hidpi support I’ve experienced. However, it’s still not as good as running standard dpi. Despite the apps not being blurry, some apps like Bitwarden would forget the size of the window when I closed the app. This means, sometimes, some apps, would start in a tiny, little window, and I would have to grab a corner to stretch it out. Annoying.
When I switched to Guix Linux. UUff. This was bad. Almost all non-wayland apps did not respect GNOME’s integer scaling. And when I got GTK apps working, QT apps were still broken.
So even though the Starbook 7 has the best hidpi support I’ve ever experienced, I will gladly take a more stable system, with less workarounds, and a larger amount of supported software over a slightly crisper screen.
Keyboard
The display was the best part of the laptop. The keyboard might be the worst.
This is easily the worst keyboard I’ve ever used anywhere, by far.
The keyboard is backlit, which is nice. The keys themselves feel a little light and wobbly, not great, but fine.
However, the actual output signals coming out of the keyboard hardware are trash. VERY often a key signal is sent more than once. The space bar in particular VERY often emits two spaces. But this happens with other keys too. I thought I just had to get used to typing on this keyboard, but no, it’s not me, it’s the keyboard.
The other trash thing about the keyboard is the placement of “home”, “pgup”, “pgdn”, “end”, and the freaking print screen sysrq key. This vertical row of keys is not very visible in the product pics on the website. But the placement of the print screen sysrq key in particular is HORRIBLE because it’s right next to the right arrow key. And since the arrow keys blend together (another bad layout choice), I very frequently press the print screen sysrq key on accident.
And other thing. I keep saying print screen sysrq because there is no print screen key on this laptop. If you press the sysrq key, you may be fooled into thinking it’s print screen. Do not be fooled. It actually sends a totally different keyboard event signal. This means you loose the ability to use GNOME’s built-in screenshot tool. I never found a way to fix this.
The keyboard is so bad, that sometimes it interferes with entering my password. I frequently have to toggle the switch to view the password in plaintext that way I can see when the keyboard doubled up a character.
Other things
Cons:
- About 1 out of 30 times I startup the computer, Linux fails to boot. Like the laptop doesn’t even try to boot the kernel. It gets stuck on the boot screen. There are no errors. I just have to force power off and try again.
- There is no fwupd support on non-official distros (Ubuntu is official).
- The laptop has BRIGHT ASS pure blue LED lights on the side and right in front of your face. The front facing LED in particular is horrible at night.
- The headphone jack is absolute trash, specifically the mic input. It is extremely noisy. Unusable even with software tweaks.
- Laptop is heavy.
- Laptop gets HOT, fans frequently need to go on.
- Battery life is abysmal
- Shits expensive
Meh:
- The trackpad is all right. It clicks.
- Coreboot is cool for being open source… but I didn’t really notice any performance gains compared to the other big, bloated, firmwares.
Pros:
- Port selection is good.
- No barrel jack for power, just plain ol’ USB-C
- The camera is decent.
- Wifi works.
- Bluetooth works…
Am I the only one that thinks that USB-C power delivery is a con?
Having the option to charge with usb-c in a pinch is a really nice feature, but for longterm use I’d really rather a seperate barrel jack for power.
The barrel jacks on business line laptops are usually a separate module that if it breaks from catching the cord with your foot and ripping it out of the laptop, you can replace the module. I’m not sure I’ve really seen replaceable usb-c power jacks very commonly, they’re usually part of the motherboard because it’s a combined power delivery/thunderbolt port or something. Now if you rip the cord out the jack is totally fucked And you have to solder a new one on.
I’ll take everyday convenience over less inconvenience in case of an exceptional event
I mean, I always buy used business line laptops for about $400 each when I upgrade, but if I plopped down new $1500 pricing for a new laptop, I’d be a little upset if I broke the USB power port. Guess that’s just me though. I don’t like planned obselence, most people don’t seem to really think about that much I guess.
I guess how much people care also depends on whether they tend to use laptops in ways and places that are prone to causing damage to the ports. I’ve never damaged any port on any laptop I’ve ever owned, and it’s unlikely I ever will because I like to keep the cables organized and out of the way (so it would require conscious effort to tug on them), and when I want to pick my laptop up, I always quickly run my hand around its perimeter to make sure everything is disconnected.
I do not claim that this is the correct way to use a laptop or that others should do the same, it is a tool that should be used the way its user needs, I just want to point out that for some usecases, this is simply a non-issue in the same way a non-replaceable CPU is - nothing’s going to happen to it.
Also, my current laptop does have both a barrel jack (probably works, I’ve never used it) and a USB-C charging connector, so it’s not necessarily an either-or proposition.
If anything, barrel plugs are more planned obsolescence than USB-C. How many old gadgets end up in landfill only because you’ve lost their specific charger? But still to me that’s not even planned obsolescence, just repairability vs interoperability
Thanks for the review!
I wouldn’t attribute the hidpi experience to the hardware too much. Wayland support has been catching up and most things work out of the box now, especially on GNOME/Plasma.
Question, what prompted you to buy this laptop in the first place? I’ve never heard of it.
edit: Ah, I see it has open source firmware, that’s cool
most things work out of the box now, especially on GNOME/Plasma
I don’t want my system to work 67% of the time. If my wifi card worked most of the time, I wouldn’t be happy. I’d like a 100% working system. This isn’t my first experience with HiDPI. I owned a Framework and returned it because it required fractional scaling and too many of the apps I use were either blurry or tiny. For me personally, that’s a dealbreaker. I understand other people would make that trade off though.
I 100% always attribute hidpi experience to the hardware. It’s a bad choice hardware manufacturers make.
- Should we only include a hidpi display? Something that we know before hand will definitely cause issues?
- Should the hidpi display be some weird resolution that will require fractional scaling? Something that again has a huge and well known history of not working well?
It’s easier for 1 hardware manufacturer to pick a Linux-compatible display, rather than expecting millions of individual devs around the world to update their apps to the latest GTK/QT/Wayland frameworks.
Even if you’re pro-HiDPI displays, you should totally blame the laptop manufacturers for not picking a display resolution that allows integer scaling. You’re missing out. It’s a way better experience.
what prompted you to buy this laptop in the first place
I wanted to buy a Linux laptop because I thought it would be more compatible with Linux. I tried System76, but didn’t like the build quality. I’ve previously used Dell XPS 13 and Lenovo X1 Carbon, both of which I like (and have excellent Linux support (and offer standard dpi displays)). Coreboot was another reason, I like that it’s open source. I also thought Coreboot would boot the laptop faster since it has less bloat, but that didn’t really pan out.
What I’m saying is that integer scaling is no longer required. I’ve been using non-integer scaling on laptops for the last three ish years on Plasma, and I’ve seen the number of apps that can’t handle it go from a few to almost none. I’m not missing out, I’m living the dream :D
That being said you make a good point. With (good) fractional scaling support on linux being very recent and only working properly on certain desktops, some resolutions are not optimal. I imagine 1440p and such isn’t great. A linux laptop should at least provide a warning.
And you can pay with Diner’s Club! Haven’t seen that one in the wild for ages.
Thanks, id been thinking about getting one for my next laptop. Now I’ll rethink that. The issues you describe do seem.particularly annoying.
