My colleague got last year's x395 with the AMD 3000 series. It only lasts 3.5 hours battery with web browsing and moderate coding, whereas it's supposed to last ~7 hours real-world on windows.
I can’t speak for the new series, but I have a couple of Ryzen 3400G and I’m not sure if I got the iGPU working and being utilized 100% properly yet.
The drivers are a huge mess of confusion (what goes into user space vs kernel? What do you really need? What even goes into host OS vs containers if you run Docker? What if anything can you actually get out of it without installing the proprietary non-free closed-source amdgpupro?), AGESA updates are needed to not have kernel modules crashes, oh and these updates are left up to mobo vendors, some of which are great, some of which will make you feel like you bought a lemon. And then there’s the whole mess with mesa that I think is just now resolved (20.1) and haven’t yet made it to LTS distros.
I’m def not an Intel fan but man, 100% working intel drivers are an apt install away and I had both forgotten just what a PITA ATI was with Linux and couldn’t imagine AMD hasn’t stepped up the game at all.
Unless anyone has anecdotal evidence otherwise, make sure you set aside a couple of working days to hunt down and compile the right kernel modules and make sure the vendor provides recent enough firmware and/or hav patience.
In short, I wouldn’t hesitate having a new Ryzen for a headless server, or a desktop rig with a dGPU. For a smaller desktop, laptop, or anything else requiring use of the iGPU I would wait a year. Unless you’re one of the few people either already up to speed on all this or finding some absurd pleasure in learning about it, in which case I really do hope you post your process in a blog or forum where other users will find it through web searches.
My ryzen laptop has a 3500u cpu. I did the normal install with fedora 32 kde, and everything works, though with one annoyance. Occasionally a single pixel wide line, maybe 10-50 pixels wide, won't update.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. I installed Arch Linux last week on a new machine and all I had to do was pacman -Sy mesa and that's it. Actually, that's a lie. I installed a DE which installed mesa as a dependency automatically.
You'll want to run a recent kernel, >=5.8 for a renoir chipset. I get maybe 75% of advertised battery life on my fedora rawhide install.
Granted mine is an ideapad 5 with an amd 4500u but it's been terrific. There are a handful of bugs still but nothing that prevents productive work. The worst one is where turning down the backlight too fast kills the backlight entirely, but you can fix it by just bumping the brightness up key and then going back down to your target.
Fedora 32 works reasonably well, just some minor hiccups, such as:
* There is no driver for the Goodix USB fingerprint reader yet
* Occasionally thin lines of pixels don't update correctly (hard to describe, might get a photo soon)
* dmesg logs periodic errors with amdgpu and the new driver for the realtek wireless card, but I haven't noticed any negative functional impact associated with these.
Latest AMD APU's are not fully supported by official AMD drivers on Linux just yet. I also ran into issues with Lenovo's Ideapad with bluetooth (ubuntu 20.04) and wifi (ubuntu 18.04).
I bought the Chinese version, and PopOS as an Ubuntu derivative is working quite well. You need the mainline kernel for the screen brightness adjustment to work though.
The drivers are a huge mess of confusion (what goes into user space vs kernel? What do you really need? What even goes into host OS vs containers if you run Docker? What if anything can you actually get out of it without installing the proprietary non-free closed-source amdgpupro?), AGESA updates are needed to not have kernel modules crashes, oh and these updates are left up to mobo vendors, some of which are great, some of which will make you feel like you bought a lemon. And then there’s the whole mess with mesa that I think is just now resolved (20.1) and haven’t yet made it to LTS distros.
I’m def not an Intel fan but man, 100% working intel drivers are an apt install away and I had both forgotten just what a PITA ATI was with Linux and couldn’t imagine AMD hasn’t stepped up the game at all.
Unless anyone has anecdotal evidence otherwise, make sure you set aside a couple of working days to hunt down and compile the right kernel modules and make sure the vendor provides recent enough firmware and/or hav patience.
In short, I wouldn’t hesitate having a new Ryzen for a headless server, or a desktop rig with a dGPU. For a smaller desktop, laptop, or anything else requiring use of the iGPU I would wait a year. Unless you’re one of the few people either already up to speed on all this or finding some absurd pleasure in learning about it, in which case I really do hope you post your process in a blog or forum where other users will find it through web searches.