My laptop is arriving on Monday and I haven’t picked a distro yet. I currently use Debian but that is on older hardware. I’m experienced with a lot of distros so I’m a bit flexible here. I was thinking openSUSE for the sake of the latest and greatest AMD drivers, but I do see that Fedora is officially supported while openSUSE is not. Are there any hardware compatibility issues I could expect?

  • baseless_discourse
    7·
    1 year ago

    The workflow

    I am using fedora 39. I mainly use the laptop for email, slack, zoom, latex and light coding in vscodium, freetube, and occasionally some slides in libreoffice. However, I do use ltex extension, which runs a local languagetool instance when I write latex. So my work load is probably slightly more resource intensive than regular office work.

    The problems:

    It sometimes will have graphical glich (blinking white stripe in the middle) quite rarely when wake up from suspend. I expect it to happen around or less than once a week. I would typically use that opportunity to update anyway, so it dont bothet me that much.

    Another problem is that the battery life is not ideal, I typically charge my laptop to below 85% battery, and it only last one and half an hour of video conferencing on zoom. For normal use, I am expecting three to four hours of battery life. So you will probably need a charger when you travel. Fortunately a tiny 30w PD phone charger is more than enough to keep the charge level during normal workload.

    Several flatpak app do not work, including megasync and freetube; however their rpm version works flawlessly.

    The speaker is not great, but good enough for youtube. It does work in bed, despite being a bottom firing speaker.

    The good parts:

    • The fan almost never spins, and the laptop barely gets hot.
    • The suspend battery life is amazing, I only lose couple percent over night.
    • Every hardware feature works out of the box for me, except fingerprint sensor. But that is on firmware 3.02, firmware 3.03 probably fixed the issue.
    • raptir@lemdro.idOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Hmmm, most reviews/forum posts I’ve read have said more like 6 hour battery life even with zoom calls so surprised to see your results. I guess we’ll see. Likely some driver issues with the current platform.

      That said, I almost always have a charger around and never spend more than an hour or two at a time so it’s not a deal breaker regardless.

      Thanks for sharing your experience!

      • baseless_discourse
        1·
        1 year ago

        I did a lot of profiling, turns out vscode and ltex are very resource intensive. I changed ltex to a basic spell checker, the battery consumption dropped from 20w to 13w, which not great, but a huge imporvement.

        I am thinking about replacing vscode with vim or emacs for more bettery life, but I am not ready to make the jump yet.

      • baseless_discourse
        1·
        1 year ago

        I just got a new ram stick so that the laptop can avoid using swap, see if that fixes anything.

        BTW, I got the ryzen 5 edition, which comes with a smaller battery.

    • baseless_discourse
      4·
      1 year ago

      I dont think this is the case: supported distro means that every problem is a priority bug for them.

      It is very resource consuming to maintain support for a distro, they need to actively fix these bug, provide official guide, and official support. This is why they only support two distros, not because all the other distros are guaranteed to have hardware problems.

        • raptir@lemdro.idOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          But with Linux that… isn’t how it works. If there are bugs with the AMD platform, those patches go back to AMD who includes it in their drivers that they publish in the Linux kernel. A guide to get something working on Fedora will generally work on Arch or openSUSE or Debian. Heck, I use the arch wiki all the time when using Debian and openSUSE…