Don’t think I have much experience with AMD, almost always Intel. Are there certain generations that are like cutoff for being too old to be stable, quick, and performant?
My first laptop was a MSI AMD+Nvidia, circa 2005. It was a low spec machine yet it outperformed and outlived laptops coworkers had with higher specs. Back then I used Ubuntu and drivers were available out of the box. It managed cpu better and the machine ran smoother than under windows, which would stress the cpu more. Ran it for almost 9 years and I retired it because it made no sense spending the €100+ to have the graphics card repaired.
From that point forward, all my AMD machines were always responsive and reliable.
My current desktop is already 10 years (Sempron based) old and it outperforms my laptop, which is 5 years younger (AMD as well).
I am a bit of a Linux missionary and every single machine I ever managed to bring to the dark side always ran smoother under Linux, regardless the core, but Intel often posed some extra hurdle to install. One particular case I still remember today was a laptop that required to manually install network card drivers, both wired and wireless. The required driver was available in the installer but it always failed to load.
I’ll risk anything from the last 10 years will be good. I’d personally recommend a minimum of 8GB of ram, DDR3. The technology is really cheap and mature at this point.
Intel integrated graphics and CPU are better imho. I have no GUI way of controlling energy saver on AMD while thats there in intel. Like changing the governor and all. Thats not even remotely there on AMD, there are apps but not on Fedora at least yet.
As anecdotal as this may be, out of several machines I owned and installed and reinstalled over the years, AMD centric were always easier to install, while installing Intel based machines from friends and family always got me grinding my teeth out of frustation.
I vouch for AMD based on my history with working it - and I repeat: I am not a tech guru - even without putting linux support on the table. I’ve ran AMD machines for over a decade, with no hardware problems, while I had Intel based hardware fail me in three or four years.
More recommendations mean more people using the hardware. More people using the hardware means more testing. More testing means more people learning and documenting how to fix problems. So in that sense, statements like that actually do become true over time regardless of their truth values at the beginning.
some things only work properly using Flatpak - Steam/CS:GO and Shotcut video editor, other things don’t work well at all - VSCodium so it depends i guess. i use Arch/Gnome/AMD gpu
Happens whenever my laptop goes to sleep and it’s really annoying. As far as I could tell it’s a KDE bug. The only fix (which didn’t work for me) is apparently to stop it trying to dynamically detect displays.
Intel A350, can’t say I have many complaints now. a lot of the issues have been ironed out. I’m not sure if the sparse work has landed for i915 yet, but once it does I don’t think I will have too many super major issues left. Im getting some artifacts when using gamescope, but that’s not a major issue for me since I don’t really need gamescope
I am not terribly impressed. The ability to build and run apps in a well defined and portable sandbox environment is nice. But everything else is kind of terrible. Seemingly simple things like having a package that contains multiple binaries aren’t properly supported. There are no LTS runtimes, so you’ll have to update your packages every couple of months anyway or users will get scary errors due to obsolete runtimes. No way to run a flatpak without installing. Terrible DNS based naming scheme. Dependency resolving requires too much manual intervention. Too much magic behind the scene that makes it hard to tell what is going on (e.g. ostree). No support for dependency other than the three available runtimes and thus terrible granularity (e.g. can’t have a Qt app without pulling in all KDE stuff).
Basically it feels like one step forward (portable packages) and three steps back (losing everything else you learned to love about package managers). It feels like it was build to solve the problems of packaging proprietary apps while contributing little to the Free Software world.
I am sticking with Nix, which feels way closer to what I expect from a Free Software package manager (e.g. it can do nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.1.0).
If you want to install linux because it doesn't support the newest mac os version i would recommend opencore patcher. I use it on my 2013 Macbook pro and it works perfectly fine on ventura(mac os 13) and should work fine on mac os 14
You might check out xfce. It’s gtk like Gnome but the development team doesn’t have their heads up their asses; pretty much every aspect of xfce can be customized. It should be a simple install from your package manager, whatever distribution you’re using. The downside of this, however, is it might take extensive tweaking to get it to look how you want as it’s a pretty bare bones UI by default. Personally I like it, but ymmv.
That’s the beautiful thing about the Linux world. If you don’t like some aspect there’s virtually always an alternative.
Absolutely fucking awful. I’ve had issues with every one I’ve used.
Been trying to move to silverblue/ublue/sericia.
Firefox comes out of the box as both a system package and a flatpak. The flatpak does WebGL stuff fine, but video is broken; the system package does video, but webgl is broken.
Boxes was the first app I had needed to open a file with, and every time I need to, I have to restart some systemd portal service first. And there’s no guest to host audio.
I always had this problem with Inkscape on standard fedora where the icons on the layers menu would be corrupted. Wasn’t so on my first use of it with flatpak. Great! But subsequent runs the issue returned.
Discord worked fine for a few weeks. Then it started crashing on launch. A bit of googling and installing an old MESA platform flatpak had the problem resolved… for a day.
The only flatpak that has worked without a hitch has been Spotify.
Everything is so different, I have no idea how to debug this shit. And even then, I’m not 15 with unlimited time and zero dollars any more. I don’t have the time to spend 5 hours working out why my image editors icons are wrong.
Having a one-stop distribution-agnostic repository where it’s easy to install software devops-style is a win. (Setting up custom repos, or installing the latest rpm every week (looking at you discord) can be a pain). Buuut I’m not convinced.
I think your best bet is Framework laptops. If not, ThinkPads have superior Linux support.
Otherwise, pick your favorite model and read online. Also see if you can find your preferred model on Arch Wiki (laptop page).
Myself some time ago I’ve purchased Asus laptop. Spent quite some time (hobby) to get everything working (e.g. fan control) and documented everything in Arch Wiki.
Then I’ve got Asus Zenbook. Also had to participate in kernel bug report and test, because there were no audio. Eventually it got fixed in upstream and started to work.
Then I’ve got MSI gaming laptop. Had to participate in Intel DRM code issue, because 2K 240Hz panel was limited to 2K60Hz mode and eventually it got fixed too in upstream. Few workarounds are there and there, but eventually got it to work almost 100%, but audio is a bit…broken. Works fine, just first few secs after silence are silent.
Basically what I am trying to tell - manufacturers might introduce software-controlled hardware features that might work only in Windows. It requires experience and extensive knowledge to make everything manageable on Linux. :)
A warning about Framework, they’re on the bleeding edge of modular laptop design (not hardware). So while they may shift laptop design entirely, the bleeding edge always cuts. I don’t know anyone with a Framework laptop and if you’re the first person you know IRL to have one be prepared for unexpected issues. I really hope the idea takes off but I don’t envy the first adopters.
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