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):
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.
I’m running this exact build (the Yoga) on Arch; sample size of one but it has worked great for me so far. Big upgrade from my earlier model ThinkPad and the screen is substantially better.
I don’t know if fwupd will work yet though. (Haven’t gotten updates via it yet).
I found at times the bios was a pita to enter, use the button on the back to force enter it if it does this to you when installing.
I mostly use mine for work (rust/go/C++) and light gaming and for both it does well. Happy to test things etc
If I were you I would wait a bit before buying it. I have a similar laptop from 2022 (Slim 7 Pro X AMD 6800HS) and everything works flawlessly, but that wasn’t always the case. First my wifi card required extra drivers so I switched to an Intel card. The Intel card is better anyways and was cheap so I didn’t bother. At first with my laptop model though the keyboard did not work at all and I had to wait for a newer kernel. As time passed through everything got fixed and I can’t find a single thing that I’m missing or that is incompatible today.
I’ve seen phoronix test Linux using Ubuntu on these new amd procs, so that point shouldn’t be an issue at least, but id be more worried about some features like the webcam or lid closing detection to put the system to sleep.
Since you’re using endeavour os you should be getting the latest kernel updates so that will definitely help for the few things that may not work. I would still buy from a place that has easy returns for the reasons listed before though (I.e. probably not the lenovo official store, their customer support sucks)…
