vuxu.org: daji

Daji is a CHUWI MiniBook X 1558 featuring an Intel N150 (4 cores), 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD (total 313€ with Black Friday rebate).

The naming

Daji (Chinese: 妲己) was the favourite consort of King Zhou of Shang, the last king of the Shang dynasty in ancient China. In legends and fictions, she is portrayed as a malevolent fox spirit who kills and impersonates the real Daji.

Rough setup

Default encrypted root with LUKS.

Screen rotation

The notebook uses a tablet display, so the screen rotation is 90° right by default. This needs to be fixed in several locations:

For the Linux framebuffer, add to the kernel commandline:

fbcon=rotate:1

For X.Org, we need to rotate the screen and the touchscreen input device:

xrandr --output DSI-1 --rotate right
xinput set-prop "pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen" --type=float 191 \
    0 1 0  -1 0 1  0 0 1

Screen rotation in GRUB is not possible to the best of my knowledge.

Evaluation

⊕ Feels like a high-end product
⊕ Good QWERTY keyboard, all F-keys, Shift above Cursor block, backlight
⊜ Moderate battery life (~7h)
⊜ Sharp 2K display, kinda needs scaling
⊖ Very glossy display, corners are rounded
⊖ Default screen rotation is a bit annoying
⊖ No physical touchpad keys