The Chuwi MiniBook X N150, One Year Later - Tao of Mac
Rui Carmo
Tao of Mac
Jul 25th 2026 · 4 min read<br>·<br>#chuwi<br>#fedora<br>#intel<br>#laptop<br>#linux<br>#minibook<br>#n150<br>#niri<br>#noctalia<br>#review
The Chuwi MiniBook X N150, One Year Later
It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed the MiniBook X, and it remains one of the very few modern machines to preserve the netbook form factor–so, given the attention the original review garnered, I thought folk might be interested in how it has fared.
Since then, it has spent enough time in bags, on desks and hooked up to odd displays to make the honeymoon period irrelevant–and in the process it has become one of those machines I reach for without thinking too much about it.
Disclaimer: Even though this is a long-term review, the machine was originally sent by Chuwi, and the usual review policy still applies.
Livin' the life
Hardware<br>I have very few complaints. The keyboard is still perfectly usable, if a little stiffer than some of my other mobile devices, and the screen’s higher pixel density remains one of the main reasons I enjoy using it. The machine’s responsiveness, even in power-saving mode, has made it a great writing and coding device.
Over time, and after a few software upgrades, minor niggles like trackpad smoothness and the slight excess sensitivity I occasionally noticed also faded away. Mostly.
When my hands feel slightly dry I still notice some "noise" and pointer tremors, but other than when using an external display (where a mouse is slightly handier for flicking the pointer across a lot more pixels), I have had no need for one–partly because the touch screen works fine for quick focus changes and tablet-like text selections, and partly because my workflow on it has become very keyboard-centric.
I’ve since plugged it into various USB-C displays, and it can drive a 5K panel with ease. That also makes it a useful thin client when I want to sit somewhere else and remote into bigger machines. The battery does not last me as long as an ARM machine, but I haven’t noticed any degradation yet.
Quality-wise, the only issue I have had so far is that most of the rubber feet came off, which led me down a small AliExpress rabbit hole to find suitable replacements. The ones I bought are a little better for airflow, since they are slightly taller.
There are also minor scuffs in the metal cover, but that’s hardly surprising given how much I use it:
This is fine
Software<br>I’m now running Fedora Silverblue 44, after upgrading from 43 with no real drama other than the LUKS decryption screen still having the same text-rendering bug. Since GNOME was not making good use of the screen real estate and could be a bit heavy in power-saving mode, I switched to Niri and Noctalia Shell as my primary desktop environment–which then cascaded "up" into my other Linux machines.
Why would I ever need more than two windows at once?
Obsidian, Zen Browser to access a local piclaw instance, and Ghostty now cover 99% of what I need from it. Anything else I need tends to become a small Noctalia Shell extension, which sometimes makes the whole setup feel like a tailored appliance.
I have felt little need to install much else–Blender, OpenSCAD and the rest of my CAD tools are there when I need them, and although the hardware imposes obvious limits, they are quite usable for minor edits.
I still get occasional Wi-Fi fluttering in one spot of the house due to the Linux driver bugs I discovered when setting up guided handover on the Cudy APs. Fine-tuning roaming settings on the Wi-Fi side mostly fixed that, so I do not really consider it a MiniBook problem anymore.
Verdict<br>The main change since the original review is that the MiniBook X stopped being a cute novelty and faded into the background as a reliable everyday tool.
It is still small enough to feel slightly improbable, but at least to me it never feels compromised in the "netbooks are too small to be useful" sense–the display is excellent, the keyboard is good enough, and the N150 is more than adequate for the mix of writing, coding, browsing and remote access I use it for. It is also very quiet in power-saving mode.
I would still like better Linux polish around the first-boot and decryption-screen oddities (both Fedora issues), and the rubber feet should have lasted longer–the only problem I can really blame on Chuwi.
But it has aged very well for a machine this size, especially one that can run a modern Linux desktop without making me think about performance all the time–although it certainly helps that it shipped with 12GB of RAM…
← Notes for July 19-25
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Review Policy • Jan 1st 2022