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by reacharavindh 954 days ago
What is the hardware decoding/acceleration scene with Linux on modern laptops such as this?

1. Can you expect to watch Netflix, fandom video services like F1tv without tinkering with some tunables in the OS?

2. What is the sleep/wakeup situation like? Can it do MacBook style - shut your lid when you go away from desk for a coffee and come back and open the lid for instant ON(back to work)? Reliably?

3. Also, does x86 laptops have the sane sleep state back? Or does it still keep sipping power and heat up while stashed in the backpack?
1 comments
_d3Xt3r_ 954 days ago
Not OP, but I have an older generation Ryzen Thinkpad (Z13 with an AMD 6000 series APU). I also use Nobara Linux, which is based on Fedora, but has all the proprietary codecs etc out-of-the-box. I also use TLP (instead of my DE's power management tools), which is the de-facto recommended power management tool for Thinkpads (and other laptops too).

1. I no longer watch Netflix, but AFAIA, 1080p/4k is still a no go, as that requires proprietary DRM which isn't present in Linux/Linux browsers (Widevine L1 and PlayReady). But you can still watch Netflix in "SD", if you're okay with that. Not sure about fandom services, but if they don't use DRM it should be fine, for instance, YouTube 4K plays without any issues, and so do other sites like Piped/Invidious etc.

2. Sleep/wakeup works fine on AMD, MacBook style. I also use an M1 MBA, so when I say that the resume speeds are identical, I mean it. The default sleep mode btw is suspend-to-idle, which resumes instantly compared to the old method (S3/suspend-to-RAM).

3. By "sane" did you mean S3? If so, at least on AMD laptops and Linux, you can pass `mem_sleep_default=deep` to the kernel and it'll use S3 mode instead of s2idle. However, a couple of things: at least on my setup, s2idle drains very little battery and doesn't cause your backpack to heat up. But if you're still concerned about battery drain over longer periods of time, you could enable the suspend-then-hibernate option, which will cause your laptop to automatically hibernate after it's been in standby for a while (exact timeout period is configurable). So IMO, there's no need to use S3/deep standby.

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