tl;dr, it's the best ultrabook/notebook I've ever had and run Arch on it.
I was looking for a light notebook also for programming for a long, long time (and I wanted this time Linux because of tiling window managers like i3). I finally got this Chinese model and what can I say, inside it's all Intel (Wifi, BT), Arch works flawlessly, touchpad is a glass trackpad and is for a non-Macbook just great, smooth and responsive and with Synaptics generic Linux driver you can really configure every tiny piece. I like the keyboard very much and the 176ppi screen is fantastic. It's also fast for a passive cooled device (it has a Skylake m3), and I get with Arch and 'powertop --autotune' easily 11 (!) hours surfing, sshing and coding. Only drawback it the 4GB RAM but it still works surprisingly well with the 4GB. And it has two SSD slots and one is even with the fast NVMe protocol. There's also a 13 inch model with 8GB and an i5 but way less battery time and it's slightly heavier (I always wanted a real ultrabook which also stays cool).
I got it directly from a Chinese shop for €450 in an xmas sale. I think now it's around €530.
However, it was so hard to find a notebook in this space. I you want a really light but somewhat powerful notebook you look at the Thinkpad X1C which is in some countries priced ok but in many, especially Europe super expensive (as the X260). But the X1 is still a great piece of hardware and as light as the Xiaomi at 14". Then we have the Macbook which is light, powerful but super expensive and runs well with macOS and Windows but people have mixed experiences when running Linux on that device. I looked also at HP (not really bad but also not exciting, the last gen Envy 13 is ok though), Acer have some new light ones but they are expensive and ASUS has the light Zenbook series which is ok but not that cheap.
So considering that this was Xiaomi first gig in the notebook space they did it quite well.
I presume you can get every component into powersaving states (which you can monitor with powertop).
Tricky question, do you get battery discharge events via ACPI (run acpid, and unplug)? That's the gold standard for uber good Linux support, and allows for neat udev rules to be written.
Edit: Just saw that you meant acpid. With acpid nothing happened:
$ acpi
$ acpi -f // to run in foreground
$
Is this normal? I checked also the dir where acpid should save its event file (/proc/acpi/events) but there was nothing.
However, suspend on lid close and wakeup on lid open works very good and fast (much faster than with the prior windows installation, tried with i3). I don't know if this is related to the acpi events.
Thanks for checking this. Very few laptops support this, and its badly documented. But it's IMHO the difference between good and superb Linux support.
Run sudo acpid, will start the daemon in the background.
Then run acpi_listen. It will block waiting for events. E.g. if you press media keys, un/plug the adapter, etc you should start seeing events. One per line.
Just leave it running on battery for a while. Hopefully it has events at 1% or 5% discharge intervals. Or at least for critical battery levels, when you cross the 10% or 5% level. Emergency thresholds can be usually controlled through a variable in sysfs.
These events are needed to write udev rules that get fired by the kernel. Thanks!
Ok, thanks for the instructions! It seems to work, this time I did 'sudo acpid' and 'acpi_listen' gave me following output (scroll the code field below to the right in case my comments there are hidden):
// Notebook was at the beginning unplugged
$ acpi_listen
^[[14~^[[15~^[[20~ac_adapter ACPI0003:00 00000000 00000001 // I pressed three media keys and plugged in the power adapter
battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001
battery PNP0C0A:00 00000081 00000001
processor LNXCPU:00 00000080 00000005
processor LNXCPU:01 00000080 00000005
processor LNXCPU:02 00000080 00000005
processor LNXCPU:03 00000080 00000005
processor LNXCPU:00 00000081 00000000
processor LNXCPU:01 00000081 00000000
processor LNXCPU:02 00000081 00000000
processor LNXCPU:03 00000081 00000000
ac_adapter ACPI0003:00 00000000 00000000 // unplugged the power adapter again
battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001
battery PNP0C0A:00 00000081 00000001
processor LNXCPU:00 00000081 00000000
processor LNXCPU:01 00000081 00000000
processor LNXCPU:02 00000081 00000000
processor LNXCPU:03 00000081 00000000
^C
I'll try this at lower battery levels again tomorrow (since the battery is charged now).
But it seems that the system emits charge and discharge acpi events.
Great! It'd be superb to confirm the laptop ACPI emits discharge events every once in a while, or when a threshold level is reached. Then you can write really neat udev rules.
Plug n unplug events are more common. Battery ones are quite infrequent.
Build quality is excellent, the aluminum is like that on Macbooks, it's very close, maybe slighlty rougher and the edges are a bit sharper. But you really need to have both next to each other to 'feel' this difference. It's a bit sad that they followed so closely Apple's design language and didn't create their own identity.
The glass trackpad has the same build quality as an Apple device without the 3D force thing. The keyboard as said excellent, it's similar to to last gen Macbook Pros but still different, it's clicky and nice to write on, good spaced keys.
The screen excellent, the lid when opening a bit less stiff than a Macbook. I don't know if they did this on purpose to let the device open with one hand...
Comparing to the Zenbooks: same build quality, case is much less fingerprint prone than Zenbooks and the trackpad is better since it's glass, I don't think the Zenbooks have glass trackpads. I'd also say that the keyboard of the Xiaomi is better than the last gen Zenbooks, they had mushy/shallow keyboards. I think they solved this with the new slimmer gen.
tl;dr, it's the best ultrabook/notebook I've ever had and run Arch on it.
I was looking for a light notebook also for programming for a long, long time (and I wanted this time Linux because of tiling window managers like i3). I finally got this Chinese model and what can I say, inside it's all Intel (Wifi, BT), Arch works flawlessly, touchpad is a glass trackpad and is for a non-Macbook just great, smooth and responsive and with Synaptics generic Linux driver you can really configure every tiny piece. I like the keyboard very much and the 176ppi screen is fantastic. It's also fast for a passive cooled device (it has a Skylake m3), and I get with Arch and 'powertop --autotune' easily 11 (!) hours surfing, sshing and coding. Only drawback it the 4GB RAM but it still works surprisingly well with the 4GB. And it has two SSD slots and one is even with the fast NVMe protocol. There's also a 13 inch model with 8GB and an i5 but way less battery time and it's slightly heavier (I always wanted a real ultrabook which also stays cool).
I got it directly from a Chinese shop for €450 in an xmas sale. I think now it's around €530.
However, it was so hard to find a notebook in this space. I you want a really light but somewhat powerful notebook you look at the Thinkpad X1C which is in some countries priced ok but in many, especially Europe super expensive (as the X260). But the X1 is still a great piece of hardware and as light as the Xiaomi at 14". Then we have the Macbook which is light, powerful but super expensive and runs well with macOS and Windows but people have mixed experiences when running Linux on that device. I looked also at HP (not really bad but also not exciting, the last gen Envy 13 is ok though), Acer have some new light ones but they are expensive and ASUS has the light Zenbook series which is ok but not that cheap.
So considering that this was Xiaomi first gig in the notebook space they did it quite well.