I recently bought an Evoworks Evo80 mechanical keyboard following a recommendation to me after I was looking for a new decent keyboard, having
been using a very cheap / budget Kensington one I got as a ‘placeholder’ since needing a new desktop keyboard after I got back to the UK (I actually didn’t need one until December, as I was only using my laptops until then).
I was after a UK / ISO one, as that was my preference: I do much prefer the larger Enter key of the ISO layout, but I have learnt to adjust quite a bit between layouts, especially between PC / Mac laptops, and being in NZ for a while. I had used a US / ANSI one at work in NZ, but from 2012 to 2021 (until it broke) at home
I had the HP stock keyboard my HP Xeon workstation had come with, and while cheap and basic, it had a nice typing feel, and I could type really well on it.
When the HP one broke in 2021, I looked at the keyboards available in store at PBTech, and I wasn’t really impressed with many of them - most of them were wireless which I didn’t particularly want, and many of them were very thin, with little key travel. There were several gaming keyboards which functionality- and feel-wise were better,
but they mostly seemed to be RGB-light ones, which I also wasn’t a fan of. But in the end, I needed a new keyboard so I just bought an RGB gaming keyboard, but it was a US layout, so I purposely didn’t bring it back to the UK with me.
In terms of the keyboard itself, it’s a pre-built premium keyboard (there are plenty of better and more in-depth reviews online of it), made of mostly aluminium. It feels very sturdy and well-built, and it’s noticeably heavy: I actually think it’s heavier than all my laptops. It also has two built-in batteries inside for wireless use, which also add to its weight. It has a set “profile” based off the shape of the frame/case, so it’s not adjustable in terms of angle, but the profile it has is a pleasant one.
I got the UK ISO package, which is based off the German ISO layout, but ships with additional replacement keycaps for the UK layout. This was very easy to manually change with the included keycap-remover tool, but for a premium keyboard, they seem to be a bit stingy with the replacement keycaps, as the Q, E and M keycaps were not included, so there
are still non-standard (for UK) symbols on them: not the end of the world, but maybe a bit odd to not include a full replacement.
I went for the Oak linear switches, which have a pleasant ’twack’y sound, and a nice feel, and I generally enjoy typing on it.
Unfortunately, I am a little disappointed that the left Ctrl is a little smaller than I’d prefer: I’m pretty sure that keyboards 10 years or so ago
(at least UK layouts) had a smaller Meta/Super/Win key in the middle of a slightly wider Ctrl and Alt pair, and that the left Ctrl key was therefore a bit wider than the Meta/Super/Win key (the cheap Kensington I bought indeed still does!), making it easier to find/press. With this keyboard (and most other modern premium ones
I’ve looked at), all three keys are equi-width. The same goes for the left Shift I think (although I’m less sure here - maybe left shift is generally larger on ANSI?). I know it’s sort of a compact layout (although 80% really seems to mostly be lopping off the numberpad), but it looks like most premium keyboards are doing this now, even full size ones.
I’ll adjust, but it’s a minor annoyance.
Other than that, it’s a nice keyboard, and I’m pleased with it.
Edit: It turns out I was wrong and unfairly criticised Evoworks claiming they failed to include some UK/ISO keycaps: the three keycaps remaining to be replaced (Q, E and M) were actually included, but were in the packet containing the Apple/Mac replacement keys, rather than being with all the other UK layout replacement keycaps, which is why I didn’t find them originally.
This is mostly a post to try and get me to start blogging a bit more again, but I will try and make it potentially useful…
When I returned to the United Kingdom from New Zealand last year, I had four laptops (and some other smaller electronic gear) in total I ideally
wanted to bring back with me in some way or another.
One of the laptops was my then-replaced and barely-used older Intel MacBook Pro 15 - which I had replaced with an M2 Pro in 2023 - but I did
still occasionally use as it could run some old x86 Mac software (although the machine itself barely ran due to fans not working), and I didn’t really want to install Rosetta 2 on my M2 Pro.
The other older laptop was my very-regularly-used ThinkPad T480s, which I got in 2019 and generally liked a lot for Linux, but was quite anemic on the CPU-performance front, so I had been tempted anyway to replace it with a newer version.
When I looked into shipping my “stuff” back to the UK, several shipping companies mentioned I couldn’t ship electronics with Lithium-ion
batteries in for safety reasons, which I had envisaged doing for these two older laptops (and then I’d just take the other two newer laptops
with me on the plane back). I enquired with several other companies and the situation was a bit ambiguous, as some companies at first said
it wouldn’t be an issue to send them back, but when I asked someone else at the same company they then said it was an issue,
so I decided it wasn’t worth risking it using this method of getting them back.
I did also look into shipping them back with DHL or something, just as an individual isolated shipment of the two laptops (and other smaller
devices), which while technically possible was expensive and was also a bit complicated, as if I wanted it to get through customs
on the UK side, I seemed to need to address the shipment to myself and not a third-party, which was a bit impractical, as I was planning on
stopping off in Vancouver for a week, and didn’t really want to get relatives to pretend to be me or something.
So I decided to just dispose of the older two laptops, and only bring the two newer ones back with me on the plane, and then I’d get a new ThinkPad
for Linux use when I was back in the UK.
Once back in the UK, I decided to get a ThinkPad T14s AMD, but wasn’t quite sure whether to risk going with the newer Gen 6 version, which didn’t
seem to have as-good Linux kernel compatibility, or stick with the older Gen 5 one which had better compatibility at the time. I also noted in
reviews that there was mention of fans running quite a bit with the Gen 6 AMD. I decided to risk going for the Gen 6 version in the end though.
Once it arrived towards the end of July, I couldn’t easily get Linux Mint or Ubuntu to run on it, as the stock distro kernel was too old for the newer
AMD hardware (I think support had only landed in the kernel in around April). It looked like Linux Mint would within a couple of months release a
newer kernel with better hardware compatibility, so I temporarily installed Fedora on the laptop and used it with that distro for a while.
That experience with the laptop was reasonably good: compared to the T480s, the screen was a lot nicer (a bit brighter and also 16:10 aspect
ratio!) while still being matte, the machine in general was a lot more powerful (CPU and GPU) and the speakers were noticeably better.
Waking from sleep was also faster than the T480s was (still not as quick as the MacBook Pros though!).
On the downsides, the keyboard wasn’t quite as good - there was less key travel, and Lenovo had decided to swap the position of the Ctrl and Fn keys,
which was quite frustrating due to muscle memory (there’s an option to swap them in the BIOS), and the lack of the built-in Ethernet port was
mildly annoying (especially at first with Wifi support not existing in earlier Linux kernels), but is somewhat understandable. Another minor irritation
was that the hinge is quite a bit stiffer to open than on the T480s, which in practice means it’s a lot more difficult to open the lid one-handed when
it’s closed on a desk for example: you end up lifting up the entire front of the laptop instead of the screen just opening.
But the biggest annoyance was the fans: compared to the T480s - where to my knowledge I didn’t have to install or configure anything to get the fans to
behave “normally” - i.e. no air movement or noise when the machine is idle and fans ramp up when the thermal temp increases - it seems with the T14s
Gen 6 AMD, the fans are always on “medium”, even with the machine at idle with temps in the 45 degC range (i.e. even in the BIOS), and the fans speed
up even more as the temps increase when the CPU/GPU is used heavily (understandably).
When Linux Mint 22.2 was released in September (and moved to kernel 6.14 which included better support for the newer AMD chipsets), I re-installed
the machine with that distro from that point on. Unfortunately, it turns out that with this new setup of Linux Mint and kernel 6.14, XOrg would randomly
lock up (although the mouse cursor would still move), although the machine was still running okay in the background, but Xorg/UI-started applications
would crash/close.
This was quite frustrating, as the issue would generally happen every ten minutes or so, and normally happened when I was trying to select text with the
mouse or scroll with the trackpad. If I just left the machine running a UI terminal session doing nothing else, or didn’t use the mouse as much
it seemed far less prone to happening.
I eventually discovered the cause and a work-around for this issue: it turns out that AMD made a GPU driver change with Kernel 6.14 which turned a
feature called Panel Self Refresh (PSR) on, and there was a bug in the implementation with this kernel version which was causing the GPU driver
to lock-up.
A forum post regarding the issue and work-arounds for it can be found on the Framework community forum here.
Implementing the amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x12 kernel boot parameter mitigation to turn PSR off again solves the issue for me completely.
I had hoped (given the kernel fix for the PSR issue was submitted upstream back in August 2025) that kernel 6.17 (which Linux Mint has just started supporting)
would have included the full fix, meaning the above kernel boot parameter work-around wouldn’t be needed any more, but today I’ve tested that theory
by commenting out the work-around and rebooting, but unfortunately even with kernel 6.17 active the issue still happens, so I still need the
work-around by the looks of things.
All in all though, other than the issue with the fans being persistent and overly-enthusiastic, the laptop’s pretty good, although I do miss the fact
that the T480s “just worked” from my perspective, and I didn’t need to configure anything with the older machine. Battery life on this new T14s Gen 6
also isn’t great - partly I think due to the fans always running, and possibly due a tiny bit to the PSR-disabling work-around. I can get just over
four hours of use with low-CPU usage and medium display brightness (this is after tuning things a bit with powertop), which is worse than my older T480s could do even with a 5-year-old battery.
In terms of the fans, I have tried messing around with thinkfan to try and control the fans a bit more and slow them down when not needed,
and while that sort of works to a limited degree, thinkfan doesn’t seem that stable in practice and often seems to crash or get stuck after
awakening from sleep, so for the moment I’m just putting up with the fans always being on.
