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Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

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Re: Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

#3

Post by jiehong »

This is a pretty in-depth list of steps! I’m amazed!

Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO.

An apple silicon MacBook Pro is quite a bit more expensive, but all of that has mostly been done for you and mostly “just work”, and there is value in that.

Re: Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

#4

Post by boudin »

jiehong wrote: post #3

This is a pretty in-depth list of steps! I’m amazed! Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO. An apple silicon MacBook Pro is quite a bit more expensive, but all of that has mostly been done for you and mostly “just work”, and there is value in that.

It depends of the distribution you're going for. Using Arch or Gentoo means spending more time doing fine tunings.

Installing something like Fedora is super easy.

Re: Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

#5

Post by prmoustache »

jiehong wrote: post #3

This is a pretty in-depth list of steps! I’m amazed! Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO. An apple silicon MacBook Pro is quite a bit more expensive, but all of that has mostly been done for you and mostly “just work”, and there is value in that.

>Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO.

This is an archlinux user. You cannot automate and generalize personal opinions and settings. For 1 user that wants his screen to go down to 60Hz on battery you might have 5 who will say they can't use a computer with such a low refresh rate.

A user who wants something that "just work" would have installed his computer with the latest Fedora, Mint or Ubuntu and would be using the default desktop with default sane defaults and terminal and would have been perfectly happy with it.

Re: Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

#6

Post by happymellon »

jiehong wrote: post #3

This is a pretty in-depth list of steps! I’m amazed! Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO. An apple silicon MacBook Pro is quite a bit more expensive, but all of that has mostly been done for you and mostly “just work”, and there is value in that.

It's in-depth because it is someone's instructions for setting up Arch, not Linux.

I don't need to do any of these things with Fedora or Suse.

Re: Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

#8

Post by Delk »

happymellon wrote: post #6
jiehong wrote: post #3

This is a pretty in-depth list of steps! I’m amazed! Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO. An apple silicon MacBook Pro is quite a bit more expensive, but all of that has mostly been done for you and mostly “just work”, and there is value in that.

It's in-depth because it is someone's instructions for setting up Arch, not Linux. I don't need to do any of these things with Fedora or Suse.

I'm also not sure that lots of the stuff in the optimization part is actually needed or useful. A lot of it seems like micro-optimization. The author probably cares a lot about tweaking his laptop. If you want to do those steps just in case they might gain you a bit of battery life, you can do them. If you don't care about compiling your own kernel for potentially getting a 1% longer battery life, the vast majority of that stuff shouldn't be needed.

Of course some tweaks might actually have an effect. There are probably actual differences between different pstate driver modes or governors. (But even then it might be dubious whether you need to or should tweak them with TLP since power-profiles-daemon should supersede it in terms of energy/perf policy.)

Re: Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

#9

Post by cl3misch »

> By default, many modern SSDs, including the one in this laptop, report a smaller sector size than their optimal one. This is done for compatibility with Windows XP and older systems…

I had never heard of this. Of course, checking on my new NVME SSD I also get the suboptimal 512 bytes. I won't do a reinstall for this, but I wonder how large the performance impact actually is?

Re: Optimizing Linux for an AMD Xiaomi/Framework Laptop

#10

Post by cl3misch »

> There are a couple of good file system options, but I chose btrfs for a couple of reasons. Subvolumes work in practice, like more convenient partitions, snapshots are incredibly useful for backups (more on that later) and compression can save quite a bit of space on the not-so-big included SSD, which also reduces wear.

I am also running btrfs (as the default disk partitioning on Fedora 40). I used to do regular snapshots with snapper on my laptop but at some point ~20% of my SSD were reserved for metadata. From that only 10% was used (so 2% overall) without any apparent possibility to reduce the reserved space.

These days, I do snapshots only on my homeserver (which is running syncthing) but not on my laptop.

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