I was buying a new laptop subsidized on 80% store credit, so I could only go for what they had in stock, unfortunately. I still haven't had a single computer with an AMD GPU, but iGPU laptops give me a taste of what things could be like without NVIDIA...
Spectacle8011
joined 2 years ago
all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14
That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.
Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM's network to do so). I didn't get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately...
I've heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don't know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.
Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it's mostly the 120Hz display that's killing my battery life...which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I'll have to give these things a try!
Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I'm based.
My work laptop doesn't have a discrete GPU; I bought it explicitly to get better battery life (I really like the gaming laptop for its 120Hz screen and other specs, but the battery life made it a no-go). It gets around 4-5 hours, which is good enough for me, but I'm sure it would get better battery life on Windows.
How did you get better battery life on the gaming laptop, if you don't mind my asking? It uses a NVIDIA GPU.
Pretty bad. My gaming laptop gets 2 hours on Arch and 4 on Windows. My work laptop gets 4 hours on Arch compared to 6 hours on Windows. My 2-in-1 laptop from 8 years ago gets about the same, if not more. My 2009 laptop gets like 8 hours, and probably more than Windows would.
Edit: I use auto-cpufreq, but this doesn't help much. Power-profiles helps a little.
My very first thought. At the same time, it brought to mind stories of Richard Stallman's "blank password" protest shenanigans...
How about Google SearchWiki? Or even just starring results?
This is from an era when Google hosted their blog on a Blogspot subdomain.
I tend to stick to mainline distributions (with the exception of Ubuntu), but I'm glad you're having a good experience!
Thank you for sharing this! It was just the thing I needed to get a project setup. Toolbox couldn't pull the version of Fedora I needed to use for whatever reason, but Distrobox works great and has a much wider selection of distributions.
The Steam and Lutris Runtimes do a good job of ensuring a good experience on most distributions. The only things that can really screw you up are graphics drivers and really low-level dependencies, like glibc. You're more likely to have issues with Wine, DXVK, and those components than the distribution's packages.
I use Arch Linux, and there are occasional breakages. However, that's the sort of thing you expect with Arch. openSUSE and Fedora, from my understanding, are far more rigorous about quality-checking and ensuring a good experience for users. Fedora is not a "true" rolling release distribution as it still has major versions, but openSUSE Tumbleweed is.
I personally don't think the kind of stability these operating systems are offering makes sense for a desktop. For a server distribution, you absolutely want that kind of stability—mostly because it's difficult to keep on top of upgrades while balancing downtime and your services requiring certain versions of dependencies. You can bridge the gap between newer releases of software with Flatpak and Snap on stable distributions, for the most part.
Fedora is probably a good compromise between completely rolling and stable. It's particularly attractive to me for all of the security configurations they've made out of the box. One of these days, I'll switch to Fedora or openSUSE...
I believe many developers have started testing and optimizing their games for Proton
I've always been curious as to what this process looks like. If they encounter a crash, unless they have a Wine developer on staff, it isn't as if they can send a patch for Proton. And then there's the period of time between Valve commissioning the fix and releasing a new version of Proton. All they can really do is open an issue with Valve, as far as I know. They can certainly make changes for the Steam Deck experience, though.
Red Hat has decided to stop allocating resources for maintaining and improving these parts of the freedesktop project. Red Hat isn't working on proprietary versions of them. They've just decided to stop paying for work to be done on them. It just so happens that many of these projects were only being maintained by Red Hat employees, it seems.