Intel's new Arc B390 integrated graphics have a turnkey Linux home. The Kubuntu Focus Ar GEN 1 is built around the Xe3-based iGPU and ships with a distribution tuned to drive it out of the box, so there is no chasing firmware blobs, kernel parameters, or Mesa builds to get the hardware working. The graphics are capable enough for light gaming, video editing, and local AI workloads, and because the iGPU draws far less power than a mobile discrete GPU, the team rates the 73 Wh battery at up to 12 hours during modest use or 10 hours typical.
The software is the main draw. The laptop runs Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, the "Resolute Raccoon" release that landed on 2026-04-23 with KDE Plasma 6.6, a Wayland-only session after X11 was dropped, and three years of support through April 2029. On top of that base sit the Kubuntu Focus tools and a curated application set. You could install Kubuntu on any machine for a similar desktop, but the value here is a system validated end to end so the kernel and every peripheral are known to work.
Driving it is the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, a 16-core Panther Lake chip with 4 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores, 4 low-power efficiency cores, a 50 TOPS NPU, and the Arc B390 graphics built from 12 Xe3 GPU cores. Intel has already upstreamed the Panther Lake and Xe3 enablement, with Phoronix testing the Arc B390 on Linux using Ubuntu 26.04, the Linux 6.18 kernel, and Mesa 26.1, so the silicon benefits from current open-source graphics work rather than a vendor driver bolted on after the fact. On the compute side, Intel's open-source Compute Runtime provides OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for Xe3, and a Phoronix review of the B390 on the open-source compute stack found it performing well across both APIs against prior Intel generations and AMD competition. Mesa 26.1.3, released June 18, addresses Xe stuttering from concurrent binning and fixes compressed local memory crashes on Xe2+ hardware, bringing stability improvements over the Mesa 26.1.0 snapshot used in those initial benchmark reviews.
The Xe3 architecture also restores hardware-native FP64 support that was absent in Xe2, which extends the usefulness of the B390 to compute workloads beyond rendering. The Einstein@Home volunteer distributed computing project is planning BOINC support for Xe3 hardware, with contributors citing the restored FP64 and per-watt efficiency as the draw for running radio pulsar and gravitational wave searches on the B390.
That efficiency focus separates the Ar from the rest of the lineup. The heavier Kubuntu Focus M2 Gen 7 carries a larger 80 Wh battery but pairs a Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus with NVIDIA graphics, and its runtime is rated at up to 4.5 hours on the iGPU or about 2 hours on the discrete GPU. The M2 weighs 2.3 kg (5 pounds) and needs a 280 watt power adapter, while the Ar weighs 1.4 kg (3.1 pounds) and ships with a 65 watt adapter.
The Ar has a 40.6 cm (16 inch) 2560 x 1600 matte IPS display running at 165 Hz with up to 450 nits, plus 32GB of LPDDR5x-7467 memory that is soldered and not upgradeable. It is also the only current Kubuntu Focus model without a dedicated Ethernet port, though it includes Thunderbolt 4, USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, a microSD reader, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 6.0. Storage starts at a 500GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD in a single user-replaceable M.2 2280 slot, configurable up to 4TB, alongside a backlit keyboard with number pad, a Precision touchpad, a 2MP webcam with a privacy shutter, dual fans, and an all-metal chassis. The Kubuntu Focus Ar is available for pre-order starting at $1,950 (€1,800), with shipping expected in July 2026.
