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Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

system76.com

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Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#181

Post by indymike »

Fergusonb wrote: post #86

I can't speak to the 4700u or the pangolin specifically, but I can offer this perspective on PopOS/AMD: I've been using System76's PopOS with my Asus Zephyrus G14 (4800hs) as a daily driver and I really like it. (freelance/web) The battery life is comparable to Windows (on integrated graphics mode, it has graphics switching available)at 7-10 hours with 70% brightness and balanced power settings using VScode and firef…

Would buy in a heartbeat if it had a 4k display. Hard to go back to 1080p after six years of Retina and 4K displays.

Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#183

Post by kitsunesoba »

skrtskrt wrote: post #178
kitsunesoba wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have been using an X1 Nano for a few weeks now and so far it's been quite nice. Light as a feather, decent keyboard/trackpoint/trackpad, reasonably battery life, and the 16:10 screen ratio works so much better on this size than 16:9. Feels quite well built despite the low weight, too. It doesn't sacrifice on solidness to achieve its weight.

The X1 Nano seems like a great buy. I think I will hold out for 9th gen X1 Carbons to drop in price, however, because I want to bump up the RAM to 32gb and keep the laptop for a long time, lessen the chance of my workloads outgrowing the machine. Or I will wait for the T series to get the 11th gen Intel chips and 16:10 screen Plus the extra battery life in the Carbon. But the X1 Nano beats my 2020 intel macbook air i…

Yeah I made the same consideration. Carbon G9 has some distinct advantages but I needed the laptop sooner than later (who knows how long it'll take the G9 to come down to reasonable prices in the current environment) so I went ahead and bought the Nano.

Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#184

Post by thefz »

brianolson wrote: post #182

I have their 13-ish/14-ish laptop from 2017, 3200x1600 display. It's great. Damn shame they don't have anything high-dpi now. 15" 1920x1080 is unacceptable. 1920x1080 is the new 1366x768.

I am avid for System76 direct user experience. How's the machine-OS integration going on so far?

An I agree that 1080 now is a 13-14'' display resolution only nowadays.

Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#185

Post by IntelMiner »

birktj wrote: post #39
sinistersnare wrote: post #22

Why aren't there any bold laptop manufacturers? This is a 2021 laptop that uses USB-A primarily, a meh panel, and no particular standout design features. Why do I have to get a mac if I want actually good design? System76 should take a risk and truly make an interesting laptop. leaving the standard, boring design to the big name companies.

My xiaomi notebook looks a bit like a mac clone and as 2x USB-C ports and 2x USB-A ports. It is not without its problems, but if you want a reasonably priced laptop that looks like a mac I would say it is a pretty good choice.

I'd have to disagree. I bought the Mibook Pro a few years ago after it seemed to get quite good reviews, but it is an absolutely miserable machine to use

The iGPU has a hard-locked 64MB of RAM allocated to it, which means the Nvidia graphics chip is ALWAYS on, causing it to get maybe 2~ hours of battery life at best

The build quality is miserable, I ended up replacing all of the screws in the machine to make it more properly sturdy (which also fixed the case flex causing the fans to grind to a halt if you nudged the machine too harshly)

Linux support still isn't 100%. The Nvidia blob doesn't support GPU switching for what ever reason and Nouveau just causes kernel oopses

After suffering with it for so many years I finally bought an "MSI Modern 14" Ryzen laptop, which I'm moderately content with. I'll probably send the Mibook off to some people I know that work at Red Hat so they can at least improve its Linux support for those who still have it though

Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#186

Post by neogodless »

fefe23 wrote: post #175
Naac wrote: post #83

It doesn't look like there is a Thunderbolt port ( a 40 GBPS port ). I recall reading that it has something to do with it working on Intel only hardware. But whatever the case is, lack of Thunderbolt is unfortunately a deal breaker. I've moved on to unifying all my docks and power chords to only be Thunderbolt. It's unfortunate because the Ryzen chipsets are clearly getting to be superior from a price/performance poi…

Thunderbold is generally not available on AMD systems. Several reasons. a) Intel wants licensing cash for allowing you to use it b) It does not actually add that much to USB. You want to attach monitors? Non-Thunderbolt USB can do that. You want to attach storage? Non-Thunderbolt USB can do that. Networking? Charge your device? USB can do all that. The remaining selling point of Thunderbolt is that you can attach an…

In my opinion, though I don't actually have this option, the killer use case for Thunderbolt (or USB 4) is sufficient bandwidth and a large aftermarket for...

Docks.

Now, I had a thin 'n' light with just 2 USB-C ports, and I could get a dock/adapter that had power delivery, HDMI, Ethernet and a couple USB-A/USB-C ports. But for high-refresh rate monitors, a proper dock will want a lot of bandwidth. Without that bandwidth, you'll have to pick your compromise on the dock.

Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#187

Post by COGlory »

qudat wrote: post #100
Happpy wrote: post #27

I'd love to replace my thinkpad. But I need/want things that seem unavailable. * trackpoint + buttons (can be without touchpad, disabled anyway) * full keyboard * strong durable * removable battery * 4k screen * ecc 64-128gb * rj45 * lots of ports * hardware switches to disable: networking, camera, mic,.. Thinkpad's are move farther away each year. I hope some company will fill the gap.

I've been looking around for a good linux laptop dev machine and am starting to resolve around the idea of having multiple desktops. It's cheaper with better support for replacing parts as well as linux. The laptop market churns way too much for my liking and I feel like the second I move away from my macbook pro (work) I'm going to be disappointed with the quality. When it comes to development, my goal is to be able…

The closest I came was my XPS 15 9560. The build quality and hardware was excellent. i5 + GTX 1050 + 8GB RAM + 256 GB NVME + Thunderbolt. Linux support was phenomenal, especially on a rolling release. After about 18 months of owning it, I upgraded the memory to 16GB and storage to 1 TB without any problems. Unfortunately, I ran into a few issues trying to use it as a work and home machine.

1) Mixed DPI is insanely bad on Linux, and that issue is amplified if you have Nvidia hardware. At least as of last month, Wayland and XWayland are basically unusable with Nvidia. Since the laptop screen is 4k, but I was using a Thunderbolt dock plugged into 2x1080p monitors, I'd have to turn off display scaling on the laptop, and, because I was stuck on X11 because Nvidia, I'd have to restart the laptop for the scaling change to take effect.

2) There was no Thunderbolt dock support for unlocking full disk encryption, so if you wanted FDE, you either had to unplug the laptop from the dock, open it, type the password and plug it back in every time you turn the laptop on, or just not used a Thunderbolt dock. This wouldn't be a big deal except I was restarting the laptop frequently when changing pretty much any display parameter.

3) There was no clear best practice for managing switchable graphics. There are options like Bumblebee that I never really figured out if they were working properly - especially for games. Then, Nvidia supposedly added a "primus-run" feature to the driver, but again, it seemed to just not work. Eventually I settled on "prime-select" but that involves rebooting every time you switch.

4) Selecting the Nvidia graphics disabled on-board audio. I had to either use USB or Bluetooth. I never figured this out despite countless hours of messing around with alsamixer. My best guess is that it was trying to direct everything over the HDMI out even though that wasn't plugged in. The Intel drivers were loaded, just every time I selected the Nvidia chip, the audio devices would disappear.

In the end, I settled on picking up an Acer Aspire refurbished from eBay. It has an i5 10400, 12GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD. I put a 1050 Ti in it without any problems. The total system ran me $500. It's much nicer. So the moral of the story is for me, if you do go Linux laptop, avoid Nvidia like the plague.

Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#189

Post by Closi »

geerlingguy wrote: post #179
somethingwitty1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't the current rumors/expectations that they are dropping the touch bar?

Hopefully. The fact it's never migrated to any other project outside the 'Pro' laptops seems to point to an obvious conclusion.

That it’s exclusively a Pro feature?

Re: Pangolin – Mobile AMD laptop with Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics

#190

Post by jude- »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #49
Happpy wrote: post #27

I'd love to replace my thinkpad. But I need/want things that seem unavailable. * trackpoint + buttons (can be without touchpad, disabled anyway) * full keyboard * strong durable * removable battery * 4k screen * ecc 64-128gb * rj45 * lots of ports * hardware switches to disable: networking, camera, mic,.. Thinkpad's are move farther away each year. I hope some company will fill the gap.

Sounds like you want something along the line of what Purism is offering. Not sure about ECC ram on a laptop. Haven't seen that one yet. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

The one thing that stops me from getting a Librem 14 is the utterly hateful decision to have a tiny right-shift key to the right of the up arrow. Like seriously wtf Purism?
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