cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/17893006

I am in the market for a new laptop. I have searched quite a lot and decided to go with Lenovo. I am connected to mains most of the time and I am looking for compute power over efficiency. So the new Intel Lunar Lake 258V processors are not for me. That means Zenbook S14 is out of discussion. Also before anyone push a Framework plug, No! Framework laptops are not available where I live.

Its for my personal use and my preferred setup is Gnome on EndeavourOS. and its mainly used as a media consumption device. But occasionally it could run ffmpeg h265 encoding, run one or two moderately heavy podman containers (like Jellyfin) and sometimes a 6GB RAM VM or a local LLM model (3b) (very rare).

Basically I have narrowed it down to two laptops:

  • Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14, AMD) - AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 (Preferred)
  • Lenovo ThinkPad P14s (AMD) Gen 5 - Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS

With Yoga Pro 7 being my preferred pick. When similarly specked with 32GB RAM, both are almost similarly priced, with Yoga running about $200 extra. I feel that new ThinkPads are a little overpriced for what they offer, at-least where I live.

  • Yoga has the new AMD architecture (Zen 5).
  • Yoga’s screen is better than ThinkPad’s (2.8K OLED @ 120Hz vs FHD IPS @ 60Hz, OLED option is not available for ThinkPad here).
  • Yoga has an Aluminum build. I haven’t used ThinkPads in the past, but had a plastic Dell Latitude in the recently (2022) and its build quality and plastics were really bad. Currently I have an Aluminum built laptop (from 2018) and its so much better than Dell’s.
  • I prefer the aesthetics of Yoga over ThinkPad (Though its subjective).
  • ThinkPad is a bit cheaper (by $200) and upgradable.

Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14, AMD) being very new, I don’t know about its Linux (EndeavourOS) compatibility.

Does the new Ryzen AI 9 300 series work well with Linux? This is the only linux-hardware.org probe for this laptop.
Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14, AMD):
Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14, AMD)

On the other hand, the ThinkPad P14s (AMD) Gen 5 works well with Arch with Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS. This puts me in a dilemma, should I spend a little more and for the not heavily Linux tested, but new Strix Point (Ryzen 300 series) Yoga Pro 7 or go for a tested Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS ThinkPad?

I am planing to keep my laptop for 5-6 years.

If anybody have the new gen AMD processor Laptops running Linux (Any Distro) please share your experience.

  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
    7·
    5 days ago

    The zen 5 chip should work fine if you’re on kernel 6.8+ (which is when zen5 IDs were introduced), but you might have some poor battery life. Here are some testimonials from folks who ran 6.11 on it and it performed well.

    The note about enabling the amd_pstate driver was interesting, evidently it was not default in my system! The “guided” mode seems great.

    • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
      1·
      5 days ago

      A couple added notes after rereading your post:

      • Linux shouldn’t care about the specific laptop, you might want to try searching for the 365 SOC instead, that ought to give you more info.
      • Strix Point should give you substantially better compute power and efficiency than the 8000 series, so you can have your cake and eat it too.
      • on a reliability note, I recommended a Yoga to a friend a couple years ago, and within a year the hinge broke and shattered the screen. She now has a thinkpad, which is a lot more durable.