Review: Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 Linux Laptop

mainstream PC makers like Dell and Lenovo offer laptops with Linux preinstalled these days. In most cases they’re great laptops, but I’ve found that smaller manufacturers dedicated to creating hardware optimized for Linux often provide a better experience, especially if you run into problems with their machines.

Perhaps the best example of this is System76 machines, which have consistently been among the best Linux laptops we’ve tested.

Tuxedo, based in Germany, is like a European System76. The company makes a variety of laptops, but the one that caught my eye was the InfinityBook Pro 14, which looks somewhat like a MacBook or Dell XPS and delivers an excellent Linux experience made better by some of the custom tools Tuxedo has developed.

The InfinityBook Pro 14 is a sleek, slim 14-inch laptop. At 17 millimeters thick, it’s not quite as thin as something like the Dell XPS 13, but it’s not bulky. It’s reasonably small, too, at 12.2 inches by 8.2 inches (31 cm by 21.5 cm), weighing in at 2.2 pounds. I carried it around comfortably in my Mountainsmith shoulder bag, and it never felt overly heavy.

Two things immediately jumped out at me the first time I started up the InfinityBook. First the 2,880 x 1,800-pixel screen is gorgeous. It’s a 14-inch matte LC, and it looks amazing. The brightness can be cranked all the way to 400 nits (very bright), and it supports the full sRGB color gamut, but it’s really the matte part that got me. It’s hard to find a matte, anti-glare display at this resolution, and this one is the best I’ve seen lately.

The other thing I noticed is the European-style keyboard. Tuxedo sent me a German keyboard, which is fine, I touch type anyway, so once I set the layout to US in the settings, the keyboard was mostly fine. Except for the Enter key. Most US keyboards use what’s known as an ANSI design, which features a long thin Enter key. Tuxedo uses an ISO-format keyboard, which has a taller Enter key with another key to the left of it. This is helpful for European users because it provides another accent key, but it’s definitely something that will trip you up for a bit if you’re used to US keyboards. I got around this by remapping the extra accent key to Enter (using Input Remapper), so that even if I mistyped, I got the result I intended.

Otherwise the keyboard was quite nice. The keys are on the tall side for a chiclet-style keyboard and have a satisfying amount of travel. I was able to type just as fast as I do on my Thinkpad T14.

Tuxedo also offers a wealth of keyboard customization options. You can put pretty much anything you want on the keyboard, including nothing. You can also have your custom logo etched in the lid.

The InfinityBook Pro is built around an Intel Core i7-13700H. The model I tested had integrated graphics, but there is an option to configure your InfinityBook Pro with a high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card. I never felt the need for it, but if you plan to do anything more than light gaming, that’s probably the way to go. (The screen refresh tops out at 90 Hz, which is fine for gaming but not quite as fast as some displays.) I did a good bit of video editing on this machine, and while that did get the fan spinning, it was plenty fast for my needs.

Speaking of fans, the InfinityBook Pro 14 is equipped with a dual-fan cooling system, which is double what you’ll get in most thin laptops of this design. It works well, too. Even as I exported large 5.2K video footage down to 4K, the laptop never got too hot to have in my lap.

As with most Linux laptops, battery life is good, but can't match new MacBooks. Doing our usual battery drain test (looping a Full HD video at 75 percent brightness), the InfinityBook Pro managed 6.5 hours. I haven't felt constrained by battery life in the months I've tested the InfinityBook Pro. I liked the brightness at about 40 percent for web browsing and document, so that’s generally where I left it unless I was editing photos or video. Average use, at 40 percent brightness, generally got me between nine and ten hours. A full day’s work and some change. This can be further improved and tweaked using Tuxedo’s excellent Control Center app (more on that below).

The InfinityBook offers more ports than you might think. There’s a Thunderbolt 4/USB-C port that can charge as well, a USB-C 3.2 Gen2 port, two USB-A ports, a full-size SD card reader, HDMI port, headphone/mic port, and a separate power plug. The latter is the fastest way to charge up, though you can use a standard USB-C cord to charge. You'll want want a 100-watt charger, though. My 60-watt charger worked, but under heavy load—exporting video for example—the laptop drained power faster than it could charge. Tuxedo’s website has a whole page devoted to the best settings to charge from USB-C.

The trackpad on the InfinityBook Pro is large and responsive. It did occasionally pick up my palms as touch events while I was typing, but I prefer to turn off tapping anyway.

Like System76, Tuxedo laptops ship with a customized OS based on Ubuntu Linux, though they will run just about any Linux distribution. (I tested Fedora to see if it worked and Arch because that’s what I use most of the time.) Tuxedo OS, which is built around the KDE desktop, provides a good, beginner-friendly Linux experience.

Probably the best part about Tuxedo OS is the Tuxedo Control Center, which has some very good tools for managing power. There are a number of profiles provided, including a very low-power option, which is what I used most of the time, along with some more performance-oriented profiles. What I really like, though, is that you can quickly and easily create your own profile, dialing in exactly the settings you need to optimize battery life for your particular workload.

It does take some experimenting to figure out how much power you need (for example you can cap the number of cores the CPU uses) to get by. But once you do, it’s nice to have custom low-power and custom high-power profiles. Set up a keyboard shortcut and you can flip between the two as needed. Even better, this app is available even if you opt to run a different OS. If you’re using a Debian-based distro like Ubuntu, all you need to do is add the Tuxedo repository and install it. I used it in Arch via the AUR.

One interesting thing I haven’t encountered before is Tuxedo’s WebFAI. The name is short for fully automated installation, and it provides about a dozen different distro/desktop combos all tweaked to work with Tuxedo’s hardware. You can use them to create USB install sticks using an included app. The catch is that you can’t download them over Wi-Fi. Tuxedo includes a USB to Ethernet adapter for laptops like the InfinityBook Pro (which doesn’t have an Ethernet port). Unfortunately, as a Starlink internet user I could not test this, since Starlink does not offer wired connections. (There is an adapter, but I do not have it.) It is nevertheless a welcome feature that should make it easier for Linux newcomers to try different distros and desktops or reset a laptop to its factory settings.

As you may have noticed from the links I sprinkled through above, Tuxedo has excellent documentation. Just about every question you’re likely to have has probably been answered in the company’s online documentation and FAQs.

The InfinityBook Pro 14 is one of the best Linux laptops I’ve used. It stacks up very well against System76’s Lemur Pro (our top Linux laptop for most people). The InfinityBook Pro offers a few things the System76 does not, including up to 64 gigabytes of RAM, and a nicer, high-resolution matte screen. The Lemur Pro wins when it comes to storage though, with space for two drives and up to 8 terabytes of storage.

The InfinityBook Pro 14 as I tested it, with an Intel i7 chip, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and a 1-terabyte SSD costs 1,226 euros ($1,320), including shipping to the US. That’s less than a similarly specced Dell XPS Developer Edition and gets you a laptop that’s every bit as nice and powerful, with top-of-the-line Linux support.