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Here you go -

lenovo ideapad 540 - on sale, in Australia https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/598337

Matches everything you mentioned, and has some other good points as well

> 4800u (not h, but 4800u is within 10% and this laptop you can put to use 25w power mode closer to 4800h)

> 2560x1600 - so good res, and also tall aspect ratio (16:10 not 3:2 but still tall), also checkout reviews, this is a very good quality screen, beautiful vivid and crisp

> no nvidia gpu - 4800u has 8 graphics cores of amd navi internal graphics, perfectly powerful for general use

It's a good laptop with good build quality (aluminium body, great screen) and I'm debating whether to buy one, but I'm actually waiting as I don't need a laptop now.

There's a few shortcomings from my ideal, which is only 13.3", and the usb-c is only ver 1 5Gbs, also I heard the keyboard is average where I like an exceptional keyboard. But basically this is an awesome little workstation. And if you can get that sale price I posted, it's exceptional value.

You're welcome!

That is a very good price. The same model with the same price is available here, but with 8GB and a 3500u. Not equivalent at all!

Ah man, you are describing my ideal laptop as well.

I don't have a solution for you, but I have had good experiences with System76 in the past and am hoping that upcoming laptop refreshes should start to hit those points or me as well.

Ideally this gets a better screen:

https://system76.com/laptops/pangolin

Or this gets a Ryzen APU and a 16:10 aspect ratio:

https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

But those are dreams at this point...

I have a system76 but it uses an NVIDIA GPU for the external monitors.

It works fine when plugged in, but I basically don't use it as a portable computer because it's such a pain to switch back to Intel graphics. There are some options for hybrid graphics but it limits the options I have for external monitor orientation.

Graphics switching remains somewhat painful in the Linux ecosystem. There are options but nothing that quite achieves the seamlessness of Windows or Mac solutions.

Did you get the System76 with PopOS? I was impressed with my last one with the desktop menu that allowed graphics switching (albeit after a restart).

https://support.system76.com/articles/graphics-switch-pop/

Which I think is just a wrapper around the nvidia drivers, but at least I didn't have to install it myself and the menu location is a tad more convenient.

yeah the restart is the problem, it adds a lot of overhead if I'm just running to a meeting or something. There is a Prime option but you can only use external monitors in standard landscape and I use mine in portrait.

Ah yeah, I have similar feelings.

BumbleBee was promising at one time:

https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ

But seems kind of dead now.

https://www.bumblebee-project.org/

Here you can get a Huawei Matebook 14[1] which fits those specs as far as I can see, including the 3:2 aspect ratio.

Never bought Huawei so no experiences to share.

[1]: https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-14-amd-2020/...

2160×1440 (185ppi) is a touch on the low side, though admittedly very close to 2560×1440 on a 15.6″ display (188ppi; I confess I had that resolution more in mind for a 13″ or 14″ chassis). But definitely far less than the ~275ppi of my Surface Book’s 3000×2000!

This definitely looks an interesting machine, but it seems they’re not selling it in Australia, so alas, I can’t get it. Otherwise I’d be very strongly considering it.

I have a huawei mate book x pro and it’s great! It’s got the 3:2 aspect ratio and a higher resolution screen, touch, 16 gigs of ram, etc. it is super nice, but it does have nvidia.

Buy it through a USA based VAR. Small ones exist that can likely help. Case in point: https://greenbeetech.com/

They were selling it in Australia via ebay from the official store, but all stock disappeared shortly before Black Friday. The 4800h was 1750 aud.

I found a video review showing a great screen, and the machine is overall pretty good. One strange shortcoming is the use of 2666 Mhz RAM instead of 3200, and for Ryzen of that generation the RAM speed is important to overall performance, and also the RAM is used for graphics memory for the iGPU. Very strange to use that slow RAM but benchmarks still seemed reasonable.

I looked at the matebook pro in jbhifi with the 3000x2000 screen, best screen of any laptop there. Unfortunately no AMD option for that one.

> No NVIDIA GPU, because I want to use Linux and NVIDIA hates Linux

Is this a voting-with-your-wallet position for open drivers / better Linux support, or have you experienced issues in the past with the proprietary drivers?

I ask because Linux with an Nvidia gpu is my daily driver (desktop), and I’m likely to build another system like that again, was just curious what I don’t know.

A bit of both, really.

I’ve never tried to run Linux on a machine with an NVIDIA GPU, or on a machine with two GPUs. But from what I have read, this is the impression that I get:

It’s quite common to have a bit of trouble getting anything working, and you will run into problems far more often than with any other brand of GPU (which will just work perfectly).

Many things won’t work with the proprietary drivers, because they implement everything their own way, and so software has to be written against the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, rather than using the standard tools that everything else uses like OpenGL and Mesa.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/linux-on-laptops-asu... is the sort of thing I’ve heard of: there, the NVIDIA GPU is trouble from start to end. Admittedly it might have gone more smoothly with something other than Ubuntu, with more recent versions of kernels and other such stuff (I like Arch, so this wouldn’t be a problem for me), but it’s still just bad.

But then too, I mentioned Wayland: because of how NVIDIA made their own world on Linux, the proprietary drivers are completely incompatible with Wayland—basically NVIDIA hardcoded support for X (again, rather than using the standard approach everyone else settled on) and haven’t done so for Wayland.

If you use Nouveau instead of the proprietary drivers, you’re left with a GPU missing a substantial fraction of its functionality, stuck at a low clock speed in power-draining mode. But I think you might be able to use Wayland.

I gather that Linux has problems in any dual GPU environment, but that the issues are far worse with NVIDIA than with anything else. If you’re operating a single-GPU machine and are content to use the proprietary drivers, I gather it’s not such a problem, though many applications may be unable to use GPU acceleration.

I welcome any corrections to what I’ve written here. As I say, this is all just hearsay.

I see, I guess I must just be on Nvidia’s happy path: I use a Debian distro similar to Ubuntu at work and Ubuntu at home with X windows and have experienced no problems; I didn’t know that there might be dragons if I try to stray from that.

just a few datapoints, the Dell Ubuntu machines (4+) we've received, I just do the "Additional Drivers", click Nvidia, reboot and stuff like TensorFlow just works. CentOS (RHEL) same.

I think if you start messing with one of distributions not on the CUDA download paper, you get stuck easily, but at least for work purposes, I don't see the point of using something other than RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/Debian.

For what it's worth I've had a fairly easy time with nVidia on Linux. My daily driver is an Ubuntu 20 machine where I just selected the nVidia binary blob option from a menu and it just works, even through kernel upgrades.

But this is also just about the easiest setup. I might feel differently if I were on a laptop with dual graphics cards.

If you're trying to do anything with the latest hardware, it's always going to be a pain on Linux. Even Windows doesn't have flawless support with every game on day one.

> It’s quite common to have a bit of trouble getting anything working, and you will run into problems far more often than with any other brand of GPU (which will just work perfectly).

That's a joke. I've been using Linux on Nvidia since the Riva TNT. It was always Radeon that had garbage drivers and really didn't give two shits about Linux. Not sure how much this has changed with AMD owning them, but I never bothered to look at Radeon since Nvidia was always the best card and always worked. It's almost never more than just doing a single package install.

> software has to be written against the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, rather than using the standard tools that everything else uses like OpenGL and Mesa.

I think you fundamentally do not understand Mesa or OpenGL to say this. And no, nothing has to be "written against" Nvidia. It's literally OpenGL (or Vulkan, today). Unless you're talking CUDA or something, which I don't touch.

This all just sounds like so much FUD that you wrote.

I certainly don’t understand all that I’m writing of—it’s based purely on what I’ve read, which has mostly been casual rather than deliberate research. It’s almost certain that I’ve made errors.

I’m referring to things like the Background section of https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA:

> The proprietary NVIDIA doesn't provide the same user space API as the open source drivers. While the open source drivers allows the display server to use the Generic Buffer Manager (gbm) and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) APIs to manage hardware buffers, set modes, and queue page flips, configure hardware planes, the NVIDIA driver forces the display server to treat it differently. Instead of these APIs, the compositor uses a combination of KMS, to set modes, and EGL (EGLDevice & EGLStream extensions to be precise) to indirectly queue page flips by linking an EGLSurface, corresponding to an area of the screen, with a CRTC of an EGLDevice, using an EGLStream.

My OpenGL and Mesa remarks are very probably wrong.

The impression that I have received is that the window manager is probably the main thing that needs to be aware of these differences and NVIDIA ignoring the standards (this is why Sway doesn’t support NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html), but that anything wanting to actually use GPU capabilities may well need to be aware as well.

—

What I have heard on the GPU drivers situation is that Radeon used to be terrible (and NVIDIA less terrible despite doing things its own way rather than the standard way), but that they overhauled it all completely so that for at least the last five years it’s been great.

I have to use Nvidia bc of Cuda, as does everyone else who does ML on Linux, which is a large majority of people doing ML.

Long story short, it works. On Desktop, that is.

So I an not sure how representative your opinion is.

On the other hand, I had gpu problems on Linus with literally every single laptop I have ever owned, independent of Gpu brand. So there’s that.

Not OP but I'm also avoiding anything with Nvidia in it. Half of the reason is voting with my wallet, as you mentioned. This other half is feeling much more confident that the hardware will be supported and compatible with Linux in the long term.

About better linux support: VDPAU does not have browser hardware accelerated video decoding yet. It seems both AMD and Intel based on VA have this feature already.

However, I had to choose NVIDIA only because of CUDA.

OpenBSD obviously doesn't have NVIDIA support, but amdgpu(4) works pretty well. I'd also prefer to use AMD's own GPU, not only because I can't use NVIDIA, but also because I don't support NVIDIA's business practice.

This was largely my experience too and always confused me about people saying AMD was better for Linux.

Nvidia proprietary drivers existed and worked, the AMD stuff was worse.

It makes more sense if it's about open vs. proprietary rather than what works better.

Though sounds like things may have changed since then.

I've run intel/nvidia with Arch Linux for the last 14 years.

I upgraded recently from an intel/nvidia setup (GTX 1070) to a zen3 w/ a Radeon 6800. Honestly, both nvidia and AMD have excellent support on Linux. Both hardware decode, play steam games, are stable, support the latest kernel etc..

However, latest steam games (and proton in particular) is better tested against Mesa (AMD OSS drivers), so it's the place to be for gaming on linux. AMD also tears less on Linux, and supports Wayland (though Wayland support could be the reason for less tearing).

Either way, I'm fully AMD now and wouldn't go back. I see zero downsides, and a few upsides.

> I have not found a single device that satisfies all three of these requirements. Any two, sure, but not all three.

And for even more fun you can add a 4th: ECC.

That requirement could be a roll of the dice. Get the laptop with the Ryzen processor and hope that the BIOS just happens to have ECC enabled and buy the right DIMMs. It's not something you're likely to see as a bullet point in the feature list except on some kind of hideously expensive "industrial" laptop, which would probably fail all of the other critera.

beware NVidia hybrid GPU's in laptops. I have had 4 such laptops, all 4 suffered from graphics problems. 2 ended up dead. 1 works great but the Nvidia GPU is no longer detected (???) And the last one still works, but graphics crash about every 4 hours when the gpu is under heavy load (I think due to heat)

4K is a little much even for 17" screens. I think 1440p is a better size.

Use the HiDPI feature or simply larger fonts if it is hard to read. My 15" laptop is 4k and I wouldn't give up the clarity to go back to the old days.

My Surface Book is 267ppi (3000×2000, 13.5″). It’s very good, but at typical viewing distances it’s still unquestionably lower than the human eye is capable of resolving. I doubt there’s much value in going higher, but it’s not useless, either—if all else was equal, 400ppi would certainly be more pleasant to look upon than 267ppi.

4K on 17″ is 260ppi, which I reckon is pretty good. On 13″ or 14″, full 4K is probably a little bit of overkill at present (315–340ppi), but 1440p is definitely less than I’d like even on a 13″ monitor (226ppi).

Of course, it’s always a matter of balance, because all else is not equal; higher resolution means higher cost, higher power consumption, higher memory usage, and higher processing requirements. But I’d definitely prefer 4K to 1440p even at 13″.

External monitors are typically used farther way from the eye compared to a laptop screen - have you tried 4k at 24" ? It may achieve what you are looking for.

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/NX.HULAA.003 They mention an optional 2560×1440 monitor but it's right alongside a mention of an Intel CPU, which is incorrect, so maybe the 2560×1440 is incorrect also.

Microsoft surface laptop 4 is likely to be this - looks like the 3 was close - except for poor battery:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3449758/microsoft-surface-la...

But it’s unlikely to be great at Linux out of the box. The Surface families have a history of doing things their own way, which means being poor at running Linux until people reverse-engineer things. Per https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte..., Surface Laptop 3 (AMD) still isn’t perfect: like most of the Surface families it requires a special kernel for most stuff to work, and the touchscreen and pen support don’t work (admittedly functionality outright missing from most laptops, so perhaps not a big deal), and if you suspend it, you need an external keyboard to wake it up again!

Also I’m shocked at the price hike from 16GB RAM, 512GB storage to 32GB RAM, 1TB storage: it goes up from AUD 2931 to AUD 4399. A $1,468 increase. I would consider $468 not unreasonable (even though the retail cost delta on the actual parts should be under half of that), but it’s like they hoped you wouldn’t notice them slipping an extra $1,000 onto the price. But then, given that the second and third configurations increase the first’s $1,699 by $425 to increase 128GB of storage to 256GB (that’s more than even Apple charge for such things!), and then by another $255 to increase 8GB of RAM to 16GB, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Still am, though.

I didn't see Linux support in your 3 points, though!

As an owner of a surface 4 pro, I feel the pain of almost good Linux support - and is a little surprised and dismayed at the rate of mainline kernel support.

Also agreed on the pricing model - but in my experience the hardware is very good. Arguably, I prefer it to Apple hw (except for the m1 cpu, that looks nice).

Eh, I reckoned it was kinda implied in my reasons for wanting no NVIDIA.

I also didn’t say “must have more than 4GB of RAM”. :-)

(A funny fact about it all is that I purchased the Surface Book a few years back simply because its hardware was so good on paper for what I wanted to do that I was willing even to switch from Linux back to Windows. Admittedly I would never have done it without WSL existing, but still. Anyway, a few years later I’m hankering to get back to Arch Linux and i3, or perhaps Sway now. The Surface Book has been good hardware, except that unit #1 was developing some problems at the age of 19 months, #2 was basically DOA, #3 had Battery 1 disappear after four months, and a couple of weeks ago #4 at the age of 2¼ had its Battery 1 die in a more unpleasant way: the computer will spontaneously lose power typically 1–4 times per day. But I have probably used it an average of over 10 hours a day, and regularly very heavily at that, except for its dGPU which is almost untouched.)

I like https://www.asus.com/us/Mini-PCs/Mini-PC-PN50/ but I use hotel TVs for my screen (so resolution varies...)

> Any two, sure, but not all three.

Funny, you just made me think of the CAP theorem. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

So, I looked on the AMD shop online and it looks like the MSI Bravo 15 satisfies all of these requirements, it is surprising that there was only one laptop in the AMD store that seems to satisfy this.

I'm in the USA, maybe that makes a difference.

They seem to only have a FHD (1080p) screen with 16:9 aspect-ratio though?

https://us.msi.com/Laptop/Bravo-15-A4DX/Specification

ah, that would do it, I was trying to figure out what the issue would be with it.

Is it possible that they just don't sell 4:3 screens very much anymore? I can't imagine why.

(Google tells me this is the case, 4:3 is the old standard and not made much anymore).

It’s the resolution I care about more than the aspect ratio. A squarer aspect ratio would just be the icing on top. But yeah, if you’re happy with 1920×1080, then it’s not too difficult to find machines satisfying the other two requirements.

I think it's just that unfortunately a lot of these laptops are geared towards gamers, and pretty much all gaming laptops have 16:9 aspect-ratio, and they also usually use high refresh-rate screens, which are also almost entirely in 16:9 aspect-ratio.

Nvida drivers are better than AMD one on Linux and windows.

Of Windows, I have no comment; but Linux—what!?

I have heard, and keep on hearing of, many tales of problems with NVIDIA drivers on Linux, and there’s some functionality from the GPU that simply isn’t exposed in a usable way on Linux.

But I can only think of hearing of one problem with AMD (integrated or discrete GPU) drivers within the last five years, and that one was promptly fixed (it was a missing break statement that caused I think it was the RX 570 to be misclassified). But generally speaking, provided you have a recent enough kernel, I gather that it all just works, perfectly.

Now admittedly AMD GPUs are less common than NVIDIA ones, but even taking that into account the evidence is overwhelmingly against NVIDIA.

Everyone using CUDA on Linux are usually using Ubuntu + Nvidia drivers, so no it doesn't sucks. The only down side is that its closed source and does not work with Wayland. Overall Nvidia has just more people working on those drivers than AMD.

What I repeatedly hear is that even with the proprietary drivers, it’s not terribly uncommon for people to still have serious problems, and that not everything can use the acceleration (e.g. from elsewhere in the thread, “VDPAU does not have browser hardware accelerated video decoding yet”).

I’m by no means sure, but the impression I’ve received of AMD GPUs is that all functionality of the GPU is available and functional. And no one ever seems to have trouble getting normal things working.

Please don't troll.

You forgot a key element for me, which is a matte screen.