While it’s already possible to purchase an Arm Linux laptop like PineBook Pro, the Rockchip RK3399 processor, and 4GB RAM may be limiting to some, especially when wanting to multitask.
But most likely out of necessity, Huawei has unveiled a more powerful Arm Linux laptop with Huawei Qingyun L410 powered by a 7nm Kirin 990 octa-core Cortex A76/A55 processor, coupled with 8GB RAM, up to 512GB of storage, and a 14-inch display.
- SoC – Hisilicon Kirin 990 octa-core processor with 2x Cortex-A76 @ 2.86GHz, 2x Cortex-A76 @ 2.09GHz, 4x Cortex A55 @ 1.86GHz, Arm Mali-G76MP16 @ 700 MHz, DaVinci NPU
- System Memory – 8GB LPDDR4-4266
- Storage – Up to 512 UFS of storage (SSD or UFS 3.0 TBC)
- Display – 14-inch 2K display with a 3:2 aspect ratio
- Camera – “hidden camera”
- Video – 4K 60fps video support
- Misc – Fingerprint sensor
- Dimensions – 15.9mm thick
- Weight – 1.49 kg
The laptop does not ship with Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate or Debian, or other commonly known Linux distributions but instead Unity OS, aka UOS, based on Deepin Linux, and developed by UnionTech as part of the Chinese government’s push to move away from reliance on Windows. We are also told the laptop will be upgradable to HarmonyOS in the future.
ITHome also showed a screenshot with Huawei desktop PC expected in Q2 2021 with either Kirin 990 mobile processor or a Kunpeng 920 8-core processor. There must have been some delays since the laptop was supposed to become available in Q1 2021, and the desktop PC in Q2.
Huawei Qingyun L410 laptop is already listed on JD.com but without price or much detail at all apart from some basic specs. I suppose the laptop may eventually become available to the rest of the world through Aliexpress or other similar websites.
Via Liliputing and GizmoChina
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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The fact that the Chinese government is trying to move away from Windows is good for us in tech. The amount of Linux devices should be flooding the (Asian) market. Hopefully normal distros won’t be too hard to get running.
Do not expect mainline support for all of them, though
And how do you make sure that it doesn’t contain persistent Chinese spyware?
Without open source, you don’t. You simply weigh-in the harm between being backdoored by an American military contractor vs. a Chinese contractor and decide which one you can live with.
Personally neither me nor the companies I work for have competition in China but we do compete against a few American companies so if I was forced to use closed source, I’d choose a Chinese product.
China is infamous for bugging hardware as well. There’s nothing we can do about it, except not buy their products.
Thank you for publishing the good news!
Mainlining is easier when the device already run *some* Linux.
Knowing Huawei, they’ll sell premium. Expect something north $800. Plus Their linux is a no go. We would want more ‘neutral’ linux distro. Well, I’ll wait for Tom RK3588. ASAP, please..
Urgent advice to Chinese companies: don’t develop your own OSes. Just make sure mainline Linux and Ubuntu run on it, and keep running on ti. Only then I consider buying it.
I once had SiS 671/SiS 672 GPU in my Ubuntu laptop … Taiwanese stuff … not open source … da horror! Never again.
They are using UnionTech which is intended to be the Chinese equivalent of Ubuntu, and is probably more appropriate for the Chinese market they are targeting.
Oh, yes: if their target is the Chinese market, Huawei knows best.
I was talking about when I would buy it.
We need Arm SystemReady specification for laptops 🙂
For example. So that you can run Ubuntu and Fedora out-of-the-box on it. But if Huawei just releases its own fork of an OS, they will not care and will not work on that.
And that was indeed the point of my post … and I won’t buy it.
Nice, at least the GPU of the laptop is greatly supported by Mesa opensource PanFrost driver for Desktop OpenGL. Due to size and characteristic I expect an about <=500€ tagprice. will wait more info about bootsrtrap stuff and the ability to install own choice distro, but it should not be a problem seeing the general specs and good mainline kernel support by Huawei for their own products.
Curious why it’s on JD. Don’t they usually sell through their own store on VMall?
This laptop doesn’t show though: https://www.vmall.com/list-676
At 8GB RAM I expect this to be affordable but maybe a bit inconvenient for every day use these days (blame modern browsers/webpages). So to me it looks marginally better than the Pinebook pro – unless there is a 16GB option.
You can browse, watch video and email on a 2GB to 4GB aRM TV box, Tablet or Phone. It is bloated Software and sites that are the problem (adverts, pop-ups etc )
On Android, the system may kill a background app at anytime, so technically you are only running only one app at the time (albeit if there’s enough memory a background app may not be killed). But on a typical desktop OS, multiple can can run at the same time.
Can be useful: 华为擎云
https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/cn/qingyun