Comment by gramakri2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gramakri2 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like I lost access to my old account, so had to create a new one.

I just bought this a couple of days ago. I went with the ryzen, OLED version and 32GB RAM. I ordered without an OS and run Ubuntu on it. The decision was between T14 , the carbon x1 and the framework.

My previous laptop was a x1 gen 3. The laptop hinge broke :/ I absolute love this machine.

Impressions so far:

* Ubuntu 23.04 and Gnome runs so good that we even setup a donation on behalf of our company to the Gnome foundation. Ubuntu 22 will keep locking up.

* Everything works - camera, video recording, qualcomm wifi, all function keys etc. Even fingerprint login works!

* Gnome tweak tool is your friend. Especially to adjust those font sizes. I switched to noto from the default ubuntu.

* Keyboard is great but x1 carbon is still the best :-)

* Maybe my eyesight is failing me but I find no great difference between the FHD of x1 carbon gen 3 and OLED with 3 times more resolution.

* Batter is like 5 hours of so when I am working full time. I suspect OLED has something to do with this low battery life.

* Love that the camera has a physical switch

Some other tips:

* When you order be sure to not order the computer vision camera. This doesn't work on linux and there is a post on LKML saying it won't work for the next 2 years atleast.

* I am based in berlin, so ordered from Germany. You can order the "Beleuchtete Tastatur, schwarz – Englisch (EU)" keyboard for the US keyboard. Only practical change is euro sign instead of dollar in number 4 key.

* In the penultimate order screen, lenovo will sneak in a support option. But there's actually a basic support option which will save you some money. I think only difference is you might have to mail in your laptop for fixes, not sure.

AMA.

What kind of programs do you use? I can get ~20 hours on a zenbook flip with OLED, because I use mostly terminal programs (black background, so most of the pixels are off).

Have you tried running powertop for a bit? It would be interesting to see if the screen was consuming most of the power, or if the draw can be attributed to a particular device (maybe it is something useless like a Bluetooth radio that you can shut off!)

I wonder, if you can’t see the difference, maybe try halving the screen resolution? No reason to render all those extra pixels if you don’t need them, right? Plus, I guess it is rare in 2023, but any UI elements that are badly coded and not scalable would be sort of “normal sized.”

Also the power tuning in power top can be amazingly helpful sometimes. powertop --auto-tune is usually fine!

Thankfully modern kernels have turned a bunch of settings on by default. But for a while a bunch of pretty simple power saving measures like iirc the sata link wouldn't go into low power states by default.

The only thing I hate about powertop is seeing how much power my wireless interface draws even when it is mostly idle. I’m not downloading a website, wlo1, so why are you on?

Maybe I need to map a new key in my window manager: rfkill unblock wlan on keydown, rfkill block wlan on keyup, hahaha.

Mostly just web development stuff - firefox, terminal, vs code, thundebird, background music etc. I am hardly ever without power so I haven't really spent much time on this. But thanks for the suggestion, will look into powertop. I assume this means that you use linux on zenbook flip ? Which distro do you use?

As for resolution, I wanted to try to run it lower res but Ubuntu crashes in lower res :/ Will have more time on the weekend to investigate.

I use ubuntu. But I’ve switched away from gnome to the i3 window manager (it is my favorite).

Ubuntu was a nice base in that it provided all the drivers and stuff like that built-in (I had a desktops with Arch for about a decade, and my previous memory of laptops was hunting for drivers on Arch in like 2011. It was kind of a pain, so I switched to Ubuntu for this laptop. I’m not sure whether that was the right decision, though).

Good luck with the crash! FWIW, there’s an Xorg and a Wayland version of Ubuntu’s desktop environment, maybe try flipping over to the other one just to see if that does anything.

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?

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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