It's nearly impossible to find any laptop that runs Linux out of the box, let alone a high-end notebook with Linux, but Tuxedo's brand-new Pulse 14 Gen 3 changes that. Equipped with a Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 RAM, and up to two SSDs, the Pulse 14 Gen 3 is likely the fastest Linux laptop today, though the field wasn't exceptionally crowded.
The highlight of this 14-inch Linux laptop is its Ryzen 7 7840HS, which is an eight-core Zen 4 APU that comes with AMD's Radeon 780M integrated graphics. It's a high-speed CPU, though not quite as fast as the top-end HS chip, the 7940HS. With 32GB of LPDDR5 clocked at 6,400MHz, the 7840HS in the Pulse 14 should be very competent at both work and light gaming.
Tuxedo hasn't precisely skimped on other hardware, either. The 14-inch display has a resolution of 2880 by 1800, up to two PCIe 4.0 SSDs (with options like Samsung's 990 Pro 2TB), an 18mm thin chassis, and a 60Wh battery with USB Type-C charging. Connectivity is also good, with 6GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2, four USB ports, three video ports (two of which come from the USB ports), and an SD card reader.
What's particularly interesting about the Pulse 14 Gen 3 outside its hardware is its operating system. Instead of running a mainstream Linux distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, by default, it runs Tuxedo OS, the company's distro. It is based on Ubuntu, which should offer users hardware-specific support for things like drivers and a broad software ecosystem. If you don't want Tuxedo OS, Tuxedo offers regular Ubuntu and other variants.
The only high-end Linux laptop that can claim to be as fast as the Pulse 14 Gen 3 is Dell's XPS 13 Plus, which can optionally come with Ubuntu. The XPS 13 Plus features Intel's Core i7-1360P and can come with up to 32GB of LPDDR5-6000, a 2TB SSD, and a 4K touch display. Regarding CPU and iGPU performance, the Core i7-1360P in the XPS 13 Plus doesn't measure very favorably against the Ryzen 7 7840HS in most laptops, which may indicate that the Pulse 14 Gen 3 could be the fastest Linux laptop to date.
The Pulse 14 Gen 3 launches on December 12, and you can preorder it from Tuxedo today. Although Tuxedo is based in Germany and charges in euros, the company ships internationally across Europe, to the U.S., and some other countries. The base model of the Pulse 14 Gen 3 goes for 1,111 euros, and the highest-end configuration with 8TB of storage is 1,605 euros.
