Remarks
Running Qubes 4.1 for almost one year now. At first, there was an issue with the VGA and the mini DP where the sound would disappear after conecting to a secondary monitor, but thankfully the problem disappeared. Someone in the forum explained perhaps this is an NVIDIA issue. I have installed the sensor plugin to monitor the GPU, and it’s seems dormant.
It’s quite a big and yet excellent machine as it supports 32GB of RAM. The 3K screen is fantastic, with better colors than I can get from my modified T430 FHD and X230 IPS. Although, FHD might be better for all-around use as the 3K makes everything small. I ended up setting the display resolution at 2048x1142, which fits in nicely for my workflow.
Power consumption is super heavy. With the smaller cell battery, I might be lucky getting above 1 hour. The plugin sensor indicates that Watt consumption hovers from 20-30 watts. So I got used to carrying my charger when working outside and bought another one to place at home strategically. Temperature hovers around the 50-60 degrees Celcius mark but when streaming videos, it can go up to 90 degrees. This is after opening and cleaning the fan and laying new CPU thermal paste.
Camera seems to be working but I haven’t been able to activate the microphone yet in Zoom or Google Meet. But with a Logitech camera, both video and audio are working. However, I haven’t been using this laptop for video conference call as I have a dedicated system in the office just for that. I do need to test this further as video conferencing has always been the most unstable part of using Qubes for me.
This model has the Color by Pantone sensor, but I haven’t researched how to activate it. I also haven’t tried the DVD/CD player yet.