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@mander.xyz
    ·
    11 months 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.id
      ·
      11 months 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@mander.xyz
        ·
        11 months 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@mander.xyz
        ·
        11 months 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.