My New Ultrabook - An Acer Swift 3

I'm very happy to announce that I have concluded my long and difficult search for my next laptop! For a long time, I was debating whether to buy a gaming laptop, which would allow me to play my favourite titles and run my VR anywhere I travel in addition to providing me with the horsepower required by more creative applications, or if I should opt for a new M1 Macbook, which would give me phenomenal battery life, extremely good portability, and a UNIX/BSD based OS straight out of the box!

After months of searching through millions of different options from all sorts of brands (Alienware, MSI, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, Gigabyte, and so many more), I kept coming back to one computer, the M1 Macbook Air/Pro (I was still undecided on which to get). It all really boiled down to one major thing for me: my laptop had to be extremely portable, which meant it needed to be light enough to comfortably hold in one hand, it had to have an extremely good battery life, it had to have adequate performance to keep up with the applications and games I want to run, it had to be able to connect to all of my portable devices, and it had to have some degree of Windows with x86 support for all of my favourite Windows applications. Basically, I needed a newer, much more powerful version of my old Netbook. The biggest problems with my aging Lenovo Ideapad 110 laptop were that it was unnecessarily heavy (clocking in at a whopping 4.8 lbs), the battery was horrible (1-2 hours max), it was very bulky, and despite running Linux and an SSD upgrade, it was painfully slow.

After much searching for a laptop that would be equivalent to the M1 MacBook, I finally came across the Acer Swift 3! This thing has a very productivity oriented 3:2 aspect ratio 2K display with 16 GB of RAM, a 1TB M.2 SSD (that can be upgraded), an Intel Core I7 Evo, and an all day battery that is competitive with the ARM based Macs! This laptop is absolutely incredible, weighing in at a very lightweight 1.19 Kg, just ever so slightly lighter than my old 1.2 Kg Acer Aspire One and still shockingly less than the M1 Macbook Air's 1.27 Kg! The shell is composed of aluminum and magnesium, the keyboard is backlit, it also comes with a fair amount of connectivity, with ports such as Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5, a quick charger at 65 Watts, two USB Type A 3.1 ports, a headphone jack, and a Kensington lock! The battery life on this Acer is rated up to 20 Hours, though because I'm more of a power user and typically use my laptop at 100% brightness, I typically get anywhere from 8-12 hours normal usage and 4-8 when performing much more power consuming tasks.

So, the first thing I did when I received this laptop is I installed Kubuntu in a dual boot environment with Windows 10 and got straight to work modifying Kubuntu to suit my tastes. I went with this specific Linux distro because I really enjoyed Manjaro on my desktop and Lenovo laptop previously, however, I wanted to stick to an LTS release to ensure long term OS stability. Both Manjaro and Kubuntu come with the KDE Plasma desktop interface (one of my all time favourite desktop UIs to date! Though, Manjaro offers KDE as an option, while Kubuntu is built around KDE). I really have to say, my setup on this Acer Swift with Kubuntu and Windows 10 in a dual boot configuration for program and game compatibility is hands down one of the best laptop experiences I've had so far! For gaming, I did manage to get Shadow of the Tomb Raider to play at 2K resolution and medium graphics. The gaming performance on this Laptop/Ultrabook is incredible for a computer that does not have a dedicated GPU! Similar to the M1 Mac, the i7 Evo processor in this Acer Swift allows me to take advantage of Instant Wake! The dedicated fingerprint sensor is also reliable and fast.

I'm extremely excited to have this laptop and even more so knowing that I'm running open source with a custom UI that I tastefully modified with the help of the Open Source community and all of their passion, hard work, and dedication. Being UNIX based, Linux is very similar to Mac OS in terms of stability and efficiency! I also love that Linux has the ability to customize every aspect of the OS! This laptop is everything I wished my Acer Aspire One netbook could have been!

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Nicholas Perspective, as always, if you haven't caught up on my older posts yet, you can find them here, and if you want to keep up with my latest posts, you can always check the News Feed on my Home Page. Thank you again for tuning in and I hope you are all having an amazing day!