[ndiddy]

Frankly it's bizarre that a Linux focused vendor thinks it's better to keep their device drivers outside of the kernel. Why would I buy a rebadged Clevo laptop from Tuxedo where I'm stuck either running their special Tuxedo distro or fiddling around with compiling kernel modules on other distros, when I could buy a much better laptop for the same price from a vendor who doesn't even advertise Linux support and get full out of the box hardware support on any distro I choose?

[jeppester]

I bought a Tuxedo machine. While the situation is not perfect (I had to install driver packages on Fedora), everything works perfectly - including standby.

My last machine was a Thinkpad, and I never got it to work nearly as well. Standby mostly didn't work and when docking it, external screens would be arranged incorrectly unless I rebooted. USB ports also did not activate when docked, so I had a script for resetting the USB devices. Sometimes a new kernel version would come along and cause it to start freezing.

I did check out other laptops before buying the tuxedo (t14s g6 amd, zenbook s14), but according to the information available at the time, those machines had lots of issues. They were also more expensive.

Therefore I'm very curious about which laptop that you think is both better and cheaper than tuxedo, and has full hardware support out of the box?

[Neikius]

I have a tuxedo 14" i7-12700H with 3050. And it is terrible. Specs are nice, price was hefty, but in the end it does not deliver. Battery is horrible, charging is disruptive, power budget is not enough. All stems from the nvidia card that I paid serious bucks to get included but it makes a decent laptop into a very bad one as the power delivery system just does not seem to be able to cope with it.

Anyway I would go with FRAMEWORK there. Sadly they did not deliver to my address when I was in the market, but now they do.

Hopefully latest Tuxedo does have better hardware support? Mine has problems with charging, usb-c charging is even worse (slow charge normal performance or ok charge and 5W throttling which makes all cores go at 1GHz), battery saving feature that hides 10% of battery capacity in firmware etc. They also stopped delivering any firmware updates after a few months.

[dismalaf]

The laptop 3050 card is the worst piece of computer hardware I've ever owned. Literally just heats up the laptop and still delivers shit performance.

I've got an MSI laptop and I've settled on simply never using the Nvidia card (prime-select iGPU only). The integrated graphics have access to 16gb of ram (versus the Nvidia card's 4gb) and deliver better performance without the whole laptop hitting 100 degrees.

[matheusmoreira]

I have a Clevo-based laptop. Our experiences were similar. The nvidia dGPU offers terrible performance and doesn't do much besides heat up the laptop. I disabled mine via the firmware. The CPU reaches 90 degrees when given almost any sort of load. It quickly thermal throttles itself down to uselessness despite three loud fans. I often have to use systemd shells with CPU quotas to manage this.

I hope the Asahi Linux project succeeds so I can buy the fabled Apple silicon laptops just to run Linux on them.

[Neikius]

Interestingly enough my clevo (from tuxedo) does not have a gpu switch in firmware...

[matheusmoreira]

Which model is yours? Mine is a PA70ES.

I just double checked the firmware setup and it seems I was misremembering things. There's a toggle between "DISCRETE" and "MSHybrid" which means dGPU only and hybrid iGPU + dGPU graphics. I use it in MSHybrid mode with nouveau drivers. This keeps the dGPU in the lowest possible power mode.

It still wastes around 7-15 W doing pretty much nothing according to my monitoring script. That's the entire power budget of a single board computer like the Latte Panda Mu.

[ghostpepper]

Which thinkpad was the one you had so many issues with, and which dock? I’ve had a few issues with my caldigit ts3 and ryzen 7840 p14s thinkpad but on the whole everything works pretty well. Worst issue has been a dumb regression with the Qualcomm ath12k firmware that wasn’t backed out for months.

[kubav027]

I have the same thinkpad as working computer and InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 9 with 8845 as home computer. Lenovo has better upstream linux support but I was able to make both work without issues. I use debian testing/unstable.

Lenovo pros:

- better case

- better keyboard

Tuxedo pros:

- significantly cheaper price

- two fan setup enables faster performace (it is stable with 90W power consumption)

- almost twice as long battery life (tuxedo has bigger batery with similar weight and size)

- two nvme slots

If you want more powerful notebook with slightly worse build quality, tuxedo is good choice.

[p_l]

I think it was Tuxedo that accidentally ended up with GPLv3 drivers and no ability to relicense them.

Which means they can't be upstreamed because GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 (for the same reason CDDLv1.0 is considered incompatible).

They either need to track every copyright from the contractors (who AFAIK didn't sign over licensing to Tuxedo) to relicense the code, or write drivers again from scratch.

[janc_]

That was a problem at some point, but I think most of the GPL3-to-GPL2-relicense-issues have been solved by now?

[p_l]

Only as of 8 months ago, honestly surprised they even managed at all.