I recently changed my main private PC. I am usually a Lenovo Thinkpad fanboy, but my local store had some really good sales on the MateBook Pro X (MBX) 2020 (with core i7-10510U, 16GB RAM, and 1Tb SSD), so I decided to go for it. I use exclusively Ubuntu LTS (so 20.04 at the time of writing this), and I must say that this is the best laptop I have ever owned, and that the Ubuntu experience on it is perfect, including some nice features like battery charge thresholds.

I did not find much “field reports” for this laptop, so I report my experiences setting up Ubuntu 20.04 here!

Installing Ubuntu

Installing Ubuntu is very easy, business as usual:

  • I used an old Ubuntu machine I had to create a bootable USB key (using the latest AMD 64 image for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS).
  • I “installed” Windows without registering or setting up internet, and started Windows.
  • I plugged in the USB Ubuntu stick.
  • On Windows, I searched for “boot”, and selected the “booting from USB drive” option.
  • At this stage, Windows rebooted and I was able to select the USB Ubuntu key as the boot volume.

After that, it was the usual Ubuntu installation experience. A few notes:

  • I used only Ubuntu and removed Windows altogether.
  • I set a BIOS password.
  • I encrypted the SSD drive.
  • I installed third party software, since the MBX has a dedicated nVidia graphics card. However, the GPU uses quite a bit of power (as we will see under), so I in practice usually turn it off, so this may as well be ticked off (if you do not plan to use the GPU at least).

Everything worked flawlessly.

Laptop setup

I did a few changes to the setup of the machine:

  • The nVidia GPU card uses quite a lot of power on Ubuntu, which makes the laptop hot if running all the time. To avoid that, the solution is to only activate the GPU when needed. This can be done by:

    • Opening nvidia X Server Settings,
    • Changing to NVIDIA On-Demand and rebooting.

This works out of the box: now my machine runs nice and cold, without the fan being active at all for casual use. As a note, the GPU is fully recognized, and the output of the nvidia-smi looks good. Without any more power tuning, I get about 10 hours of battery in casual use, more than enough for me.

  • The most amazing thing from my point of view is the possibility to set up battery thresholds out-of-the-box, without any tweaking requested. To increase my battery life, I like to limit it to 65% charge level at maximum, and to start again charging only when the level hits 50%. This avoids the “dead battery for always plugged in laptop” symptom. On all laptops I had owned previously, this was either impossible to set on Ubuntu 20.04, or needed to install additional software (tlp for Thinkpads). But everything is ready-to-use on the MBX with Ubuntu 20.04:

    • I can set the maximum charge by writing it through: sudo vim /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold and simply writing the max charging in percent (i.e. 65).

    • I can set the start charge threshold in the same way by writing to sudo vim /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold and writing the threshold (50).

This is the first time I get my hand on a laptop where this works out of the box on Ubuntu!

Note however that the content of these files is wiped out at each reboot. So, in order to have these battery thresholds active each time the machine is started, these should be written each time boot takes place. There are several solutions for that: using cron and the sudo crontab, a udev rule, or a systemd service. I am most used to cron, so all I need to do is add a couple of entries there:

admin_jr@MBX20:~$ sudo crontab -e
@reboot sleep 20; echo 70 > /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold 
@reboot sleep 30; echo 55 > /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold

Ubuntu customizations

I also performed the usual Ubuntu customizations, like auto-hiding of the top bar and task launcher, changing to dark theme, etc. Just a few notes, as it is always a bit annoying to need to spend time googling for the solutions to these customizations:

  • To get the tiled desktops, I installed the Workspace Matrix gnome extension (from firefox).
  • To turn the App launched into a Dash with much more customization possibilities I installed the Dash to Dock gnome extension.

Setting parameters for both extensions already improves things quite a bit. In addition, I needed a few tweaks to get all auto hiding to work as I want, in particular for the top bar. This requested:

  • sudo apt install gnome-tweaks
  • sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-autohidetopbar
  • setting the parameters in the gnome-tweak applet
  • restarting gnome (Alt-F2 and then executing the command r).

Conclusion

These few steps provide an amazing, sleek Ubuntu 20.04 laptop. The battery life is excellent, and the battery thresholds mean that it will retain its performace for probably 10 years or so at least. The machine runs cold, nearly never uses the fan in casual workload, and is very responsive. I have not found any glitches on Ubuntu yet, and everything just worked fine. The build quality is excellent, the laptop feels robust, the keyboard is excellent too, and the screen is beautiful with very thin bezels. This is without doubt the best Ubuntu machine I have ever used, and I think the MBX line of products will become my new go-to laptops. The only regret I have is that I could not get a version with 32 or 48GB of RAM, but 16GB is enough for most of my non-professional uses.