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?
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:
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!
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.
I bought 32GB so I might be mounting something as tmpfs rather than using swap :)
That said it shouldn’t really impact battery life
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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.