Comment by virtualritz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by virtualritz | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Xiaomi RedMiBook Pro 15" 2022 edition last summer. On Aliexpress no less. The machine was a steal at 1.2kEUR. I bought the maxed out config which is about 1.5k if you buy it e.g. via the Xiamomi shop instead [1].

There is excellent support for all hardware on Linux (and even a ICC profile) in [2]. I run System76's pop!_OS on it. Everything works dandy. The machine is a beast.

It has a 3.2k (!) res screen. Only 400nits but I find that's plenty for the lighting conditions I use it under. The case is milled from dark alluminum and is frequently mistaken for a macbook. The build quality is top.

It's a Ryzen 6800H APU with built in Radeon and an NVIDIA GTX2050. It has 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.

It's the first non-mac I bought in a decade after getting disappointed with macOS in recent years.

The only thing that isn't on par is the touchpad on Linux. On Windows it's very close so this is definitely a config issue. I may just have to spend some time with settings.

[1] https://www.xiaomihome.global/xiaomi-laptops/xiaomi-redmiboo...

[2] https://github.com/vrolife/modern_laptop

I've been eying up this laptop. Could you elaborate on your experience with it on Linux? Have the patches in [2] been mainlined? If not, have they worked between kernel releases (e.g. linux-5.x to linux-6.x)? How's the battery life? 3200x2000 @ 15.6" = 242ppi. Are you able to use integer (2x) scaling comfortably?

I used Kubuntu on it before switching to pop!_OS because non-integer scaling was blurry on the Ubuntu desktop.

Kubuntu was totally fine. I always use around 1.5x scaling on this res/ppi.

Integer scaling works fine (and is sharp) on both desktops.

There are no patches in this repo but actual driver kernel modules. I don't think any of them have been mainlined but I may be wrong. Whenever I update the kernel, I run a single script from that repo. But I don't update kernels unless there is good reason for my particular hardware.

I used the 5.17 kernel series until two weeks ago and switched to 6 since then. Everything works perfectly fine.

Feel free to PM me for any other questions about this machine.

An impressive amount of work has gone into that repo! Presumably, loading those modules taints the kernel, but that's a fair compromise for the functionality gained. Some of them e.g. 8852BE appear to be making their way into 6.1.

How's the battery life across different workloads?

I frankly do not know about battery life.

I almost exclusively use the laptop at home when sitting in my super comfy lounge chair all day to code.

The most I traveled while working (text editor, compiling Rust code from time to time) was four hours. I believe to recall half of the battery was left after that.

Try using Wayland and see how the touchpad feels. Should be much better. Nvidia makes it problematic to use Wayland, but it’s a good test to verify the quality of the trackpad hardware.

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