I wrote a review of the Clevo w230ss laptop last month which specifically covered the Linux perspective. I’m pleased to report that the laptop still works great and I remain very satisfied with it. However I’ve found one minor issue with the laptop and Linux I thought I’d mention for others that may be interested in this combination.

I was on a plane using the laptop to watch a movie when I had to get up to let a seat mate go to the washroom. I closed the lid but when I sat back down and opened the lid to resume watching the movie I couldn’t get any sound out of the headphone jack. The only thing that solved it was doing a cold boot (i.e. power off fully and then start again), even a restart didn’t do the trick.

Turns out this is a known bug in the kernel and you can view the bug report here. Due to the complaints about the quality of the headphone output in the previous model, the w230st, Clevo added a DAC to the w230ss which is triggering this issue. Hopefully this will get addressed shortly.