Custom NV41: review and setup
Buying a laptop is not an easy thing. Today market is focused on extremely light, not durable and expensive devices, often proprietary. I wandered a lot accross the web to find the perfect laptop and eventually I realised that the only solution was to configure one by myself.
To do so, I buyed this Nova Custom Clevo laptop, called NV41.
NV41 is a very well-built laptop: small, elegant and powerful.
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– Keyboard: It’s a good keyboard. Surely the old thinkpad one was better but, as a 2023 laptop, it is solid, elegant, slim and comfortable. Characters are well printed and accurate. I choose to use the dvorak layout to write faster and in a comfortable way. I can switch to qwerty italian layout using a shortcut. (I need to because of accents like ì, ò, à, è, ù). Keyboard does have white backlight which you can regulate. Keys are silent, which is a good thing for me since I often write during night.
– Chassis: It’s shiny, metallic, cold and solid. It can cool the laptop very fast and it’s a good thing. Idle temperature is 33°. I usually compile using 8/16 cores with a temperature of ~90°.
– Fans: While on heavy load, they are powerful and loud, but for me it’s not a problem. You can use a shortcut (fn+1) to set the speed to maximum. Probably you could choose a low-power profile or even disable fans, but I’ve not tried it yet. Heat removal is the most efficient I ever saw. The temperature goes from 81° to 30°-40° in just few seconds.
– Firmware: It’s fast and not proprietary. I like it.
– Engraved logo: It’s precise and well done. It’s not heavily visible, but I’m pleased with it.
– Nova Custom support: The support is very nice, Wessel answered all my questions professionally.
– Packaging: It was done nicely, laptop traveled around Europe and arrived in perfect state.
– Construction: I never saw such precision. Perfect.
– Battery: It's a good one: it lasts more than 3-4 hours under light load. I usually use backlight to minimum (and screen brightness too), my OS is pretty clean, no useless background services. I noticed that battery is brutally drained when compiling (as expected). Because of that I never compile while unplugged.
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– Touchpad: It’s big, clean and elegant. It works, but I don’t like the fact you have to press and bend it strongly the left and right buttons to make clicks. To avoid that, I never use the left and right click. It’s not a big problem, you can just tap the touchpad to make clicks. Strange fact: the middle click works fine.
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Configuration
Compositor: I like simple/fast systems and because of that I use a tiling compositor and not a full desktop environment like Gnome or KDE. I'm using Hyprland because of nice effects and rounded window borders.
Kernel: Compiling the kernel is fun, but on laptops I usually don't because their use case is variable and I could end up with missing features.
Init system: I use OpenRC because of minimalism and simplicity.
Terminal: I use Alacritty because it's fast and simple to configure. As fallback terminal I use Foot because is more stable.
Bar: I use Waybar because is the most mature Wayland bar (in my opinion).
Shell: I use fish because it has nice features and prompt looks good. I can create simple functions and use auto-completition.
Notifications: I use Mako because it's simple.
Launcher: I use Wofi because it's mature enough. Other alternatives seems overcomplicated or just ugly-looking.
If you want to replicate my setup here are some configuration files. Remember to puth them in the correct directory and rename each file to remove the ".conf" at the end.
Waybar configuration files
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Hyprland configuration files
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Mako configuration file
config.conf |