Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Inside, the Zr Gen 1 features a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, RTX 5090 graphics, 24GB of GDDR7 RAM (expandable up to 192GB), and two SSDs, one 1TB and one 2TB. (You get up to four drives, one of which is a PCIe GEN 5×4 NVMe.) Besides the discrete GPU, there’s also an integrated drive, which means you can turn off the discrete drive to maximize battery life. I spent about 90 percent of the time with the discrete card off and on when editing photos and video.
Thanks to the Zr’s size, there’s plenty of room for a full-sized keyboard with numeric pad. The keyboard is user-configurable and features a 65,536-color LED backlight system that you can adjust to your liking using the focus tool. Typing on the keyboard is comfortable. There’s 3.5mm travel to the keys, so they’re lively and responsive. As is generally the case with Linux laptops, there’s a Kubuntu key (gear icon) instead of a Windows key.
Did I mention that the Zr Gen 1 weighs 8 pounds? It’s a big thing, too big for him Shoulder bag. You will definitely want to backpack So, but even then, this isn’t the kind of thing you bring to a coffee shop. It’s the kind of thing you take to the lab and back, or maybe leave on your desk connected to your device Home laboratory. To that end, I would say that when I tell you that battery life averages about four hours, I would also add that it doesn’t matter. This is not a laptop you carry with you. Being able to take it to the couch and watch a movie on it whenever you want is an added bonus, but it’s not really the point of the machine.
What’s the point of a laptop like this? Anything that requires serious computing power, whether that’s machine learning (running TensorFlow), on-premises LLM courses, big data processing workflows, or even sophisticated video editing. I should note that Davinci Resolve played unlike anything else when I installed it on the Zr Gen 1. I always thought everyone had to wait a few seconds before applying a LUT to a large clip. Turns out, that can be instantaneous, if you have the GPU for it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you can edit video without proxy clips, but… maybe you can, depending on the length of your clips.
Keep it in focus
Photo: Scott Gilbertson
The advantage of purchasing a Linux-enabled laptop is that you don’t have to deal with the potential complexities of Linux system administration. I’m writing this on an Arch based machine. If you install an update now and it breaks vim, tmux, rxvt-unicode, or any other piece of software from the kernel all the way up to these three, it’s my responsibility to fix that. What Kubuntu Focus offers is that you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff crashing.