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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

#411

Post by paranoidrobot »

deepsun wrote: post #410
paranoidrobot wrote: post #402

I'll give System76 (and their hardware partner) this: They're getting closer to something I'd buy. This looks like a good option for a 15.6" laptop. My issue with it is that they're still shipping with those barrel plugs AC adapters, and don't appear to support USB-PD for charging on the USB-C ports. The lack of Australian support also makes it a difficult purchase - a former colleague bought a System76 laptop a few…

Don't they support USB-C charging? I compared the other days all their models, those that rated at 65W all supported USB-C charging.

I don't think so.

Clevo are known to be the OEM behind many (all?) of System76's laptops. In Australia they're sold under the brand of Metabox.

The System76 Pangolin tech specs[1] match the Metabox Edge specs[2] and visually match as far as I can tell identically, and neither mention USB-PD or Charging capability. Metabox specifically call out USB-PD capability on their other range of laptops, so I don't think it's an omission.

[1] https://system76.com/laptops/pangolin#specs [2] https://www.metabox.com.au/store/Edge-Range/Specs

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

#412

Post by samatman »

acdha wrote: post #406
samatman wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely travel! From my desk, to my easy chair, to my bed, and back again. Not hard on my battery (two of those have charge cables handy) but difficult to pull off with a desktop. Now that you mention it, it's been more than a year since my laptop has left my home. Ouch.

FWIW, I found that losing that tended to remove low-productivity time - I do work at my desk and call it a day, whereas it was a little too easy to be hunched on the couch surfing HN. If I really want to do something, walking over to the desktop only takes a few seconds. Granted, becoming a parent also meant that things like watching a movie are “haha, I’m going to sleep” now, too.

Not me, I get a lot of work done in bed, probably more than half. The easy chair is not a productive setting, I grant you. Lately I prefer to pick up the kindle or tablet for a short break from the desk, and this is probably more conducive to work than switching from "getting things done" to "browsing HN/Twitter" on the same machine.

I use a sit/stand desk but barely ever sit at it, so fifteen minutes of down time here and there helps.

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

#413

Post by nightowl_games »

samatman wrote: post #401
rattray wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate makes me wonder what it'd be like to have a keyboard layout in which the num pad is in the middle of the keyboard, such that on a qwerty keyboard Q-T, A-G, Z-V are on one side and Y-P, H-L, B-M on another, with the numbers in the middle (separated by a buffer space). I know this sounds crazy, but IME the worst part of keyboard ergonomics on mac laptops is that my hands are much closer together than my sho…

I've considered it! I use an ErgoDox, and there's just enough space in the middle for a numpad. But I often stick my phone there, and I just don't think I'd use it very often. Technically I can pop up a layer to turn the right side keys into a numpad (advantage of ortholinear) but I don't quite have the muscle memory to really take advantage of it so that's basically wasted. I've mulled over having a special lighting…

I've been thinking about buying a trackpad and an ergodox and putting the trackpad in the middle. Think it will fit? Think that's a good idea? Where do you put the mouse when using an ergodox?

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

#414

Post by nightowl_games »

aasasd wrote: post #390
rattray wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate makes me wonder what it'd be like to have a keyboard layout in which the num pad is in the middle of the keyboard, such that on a qwerty keyboard Q-T, A-G, Z-V are on one side and Y-P, H-L, B-M on another, with the numbers in the middle (separated by a buffer space). I know this sounds crazy, but IME the worst part of keyboard ergonomics on mac laptops is that my hands are much closer together than my sho…

I've been vaguely pining for an Advantage keyboard with a trackpad in the middle. In a typical display of mainstream keyboard makers being completely stuck on the same track, keyboards with an embedded trackpad have it on the right, despite laptops providing a ubiquitous example right in our faces and hands.

This 100%. Or a trackball. Look up the oddball keyboard or the ultimate hacking keyboard with its modules concept.

I've been thinking of getting an ergodox and putting a trackpad in the middle..not sure if the windows Trackpads on Amazon will work on Linux though.

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

#415

Post by nightowl_games »

joshuaengler wrote: post #235
fnord77 wrote: post #218

I don't understand why many of these workstation-class laptops have num. pads. It is so annoying to type with your hands off-center from the screen.

Ever try using Blender without one? You absolutely need the numpad for 3D programs and game engines, otherwise it's outright painful.

Im not a top tier user of blender but I get by via remapping some of the relevant keys. I don't use all the features, but I feel like having no numpad is well supported in blender, and is irrelevant in Unity and Godot. Can't speak to unreal.

Using a mouse is very bad for my shoulders if it's too far away from my center. Numpads are simply not an option for me, unless I had an external one in a special location.

I think the numpad users are outnumbered by the indifferent and numpad haters. I'm in the latter column.

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

#416

Post by nightowl_games »

rvanlaar wrote: post #88
unionpivo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was/am thinkpad user also. I have migrated to desktops. They are cheap enough to have one at the office and one at home. Sure the above wont work for everybody, but if you are like me, you unpacked the laptop at home and at work each day at exactly the same space, where all the cables and extra monitors were. I used to use laptop in coffee shops and outdoors, but nowadays between phone, and tablets (wel phone and k…

My main reason to go for a laptop was that I wanted to continue coding where I left off and not have to worry about differing settings and system configuration. Did you solve those problems? and if so how?

I do all my development in VSCode, and symlink my settings to a git repo. VSCode really let's you customize a lot of stuff, and if you lean into it as your development environment, you get awesome cross platform support.

That same git repo has scripts that apply some of my system configurations, and a readme to walk me through the GUI stuff I have to do.

My first few setups were hard. I had to debug some weird issues on my Linux install. (Not sleeping properly, remapping some keyboard keys).

But now I've got it cased. I setup 3 machines (2 Linux, 1 windows) over the past couple days and all are essentially equal development experience now. Was super fast to setup l. If your going the Linux route, make a repo where you record all the tweaks your making so you can redo them if you need to on a new machine.

It's shitty the first time, but now I know I can buy any new machine and have it ready to rip in mere minutes. With my custom keyboard layout (home, end, pageup, pagedown, alt, cntrl, alt+tab), my custom VSCode hotkeys, my ssh key identity management, my terminal font and themes, my system hotkeys (moving windows around and switching workspaces). Now that I've got all this setup, it feels great. Feels very fluid on all 3 machines.

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

#417

Post by Sebb767 »

acoard wrote: post #356
Sebb767 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've have a G14 with RTX2060 and I'm very happy. Battery life is good (4-6h work with IDE etc) and webcams work as intended. DRM is mostly a non-issue, at least not more than on any other Linux install. The nvidia driver is a bit of a pain to set up, especially if you're on wayland or if you want to use displays via USB C (reverse prime does not work yet due to an nvidia driver bug, so you need to use the nvidia gpu…

>EDIT: One unbelievably good point I initially forgot: You can run a VM with GPU passthrough on the laptop. If you need Windows with graphics performance, especially on the go, this is an incredible advantage. Can you speak more to this? Does Pop_OS! configure this (more-or-less) out of the box? Would it work with any Nvidia card or are there restrictions? I'm interested in such a setup and have done research from af…

> Can you speak more to this?

Sure! Regards working out of the box, you'll probably have no luck with that. VFIO is still somewhat of a niche and VFIO on a laptop is a niche of a niche, so you'll need to expect some command line usage and a bit of config file editing. This being said, getting it to work is not too hard and, if you've done VFIO in the past, you should feel right at home.

For the initial setup, you can mostly follow the guide on the arch wiki [0]. You might need to adapt it a bit on ubuntu(-based) systems, but the major points are the same. The only difference to the usual setup is that you need to include an APCI-table [3] to get the laptop driver to work in the VM. This reddit thread [1] describes it quite well. The author of that thread also has a repo [2] where he published his files and on which I based my scripts on. Note that you need the usual CPUID work-around (see the "Error 43" section on the arch vfio page). Also, you'll need an USB C to HDMI/DisplayPort/... cable and a monitor for the initial setup, after that you can use a dummy plug [5] and looking glass (also described on the arch wiki) to use pass through without external monitor. The setup is also very stable for me, with the exception of the looking glass part - if you absolutely depend on the setup, having a monitor handy will save you a bit of headache, but you can always revert to a VM display in the worst case.

Regarding GPU support: It should support all GPU configurations, but you should check reddit etc to be sure. If you're talking about other laptops, the situation is a bit different. The big advantage of the G14 is (1) that the GPU has its own IOMMU group and is therefore easy to isolate and (2) that the display ports are well split between the two GPUs (the HDMI out and the internal display are connected to the AMD iGPU and the USB C DP-channel is connected to the RTX). This is rather rare, but makes setting this up (comparatively) easy. Note that the USB channel of the USB C out is not routed via the GPU, so if you're connected to a docking station, its display ports will be used by the VM, but the USB ports are on the host, still. This, however, comes with the drawback that you can not pass through an USB controller, as the groups for those do not work out. The ACS override patch (see arch wiki) might fix this, but unless you need to use audio interfaces, the "normal" USB redirector will suffice anyway.

Rebooting is semi-required. In order to change from VM to Linux and back, you'll need to [un-]bind the nvidia driver and switch to vfio-pci. Going from Linux to VM is only possible when nothing uses the nvidia driver, which either needs a restart of your display server or only using the iGPU for all apps (quite easy on sway/wayland, haven't tried on X). The reverse should work as well - the author of the reddit threads above has scripts to do so, but this did not work out for me. Leaving the vfio-pci driver for the GPU is not an option either, as this will prevent it from going into the low power state and therefore heat up the laptop and use up the battery. Because of this, I usually simply reboot. In summary, if you don't mind rebooting, having the GPU bound to vfio-pci via kernel parameter on a secondary boot option is by far the easier way :) But it should be possible without, it'll just be a bit of work.

To work with CUDA, you'll need to have the nvidia driver loaded, but you'll want to have that anyway to enable low-power states, as mentioned above. Using only the iGPU for display is possible in combination with CUDA, you'll simply need to stop your CUDA-apps before unbinding the driver. That's actually the setup I use, too :)

Hope this helps!

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/hx5j8q/success_with_l...

[2] https://git.deck.sh/shark/g14gpu

[3] Since the original link is down for me: You need the ACPI table [4] and include it like this in the ``-part:
See: https://git.deck.sh/shark/g14gpu/src/branch/master/win10.xml...

[4] https://git.deck.sh/shark/g14gpu/src/branch/master/acpitable...

[5] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086MKR9WH - no affiliation, anything should work

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

#418

Post by vladvasiliu »

f6v wrote: post #324
lumost wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really unclear on the motivation for sticking a 50wh battery in a machine which can easily burn 25+wh in normal operation. If the computer can only hold up a 1.5 hour battery it really doesn't satisfy the use case of a laptop, doubling the battery up to 99 wh really allows for a 3-4 hour minimum battery life and a longer battery life for non-GPU work.

You can still carry it in your bag and plug it in at home/work.

This. I have a laptop that I rarely use on battery. It spends most of its life on a desk tethered to an external monitor. The advantage of being a laptop is that I can take it to my parents' house on the weekend, carry it back and forth to the office, etc.

But then, at the office, they got some HP Elitedesk minis, which are very small - but use regular desktop CPUs - and I bought one for myself. Now the laptop spends most of its days in a drawer because the desktop is much beefier and just as portable.

Of course, there are use-cases that a computer requiring an external screen and AC to even work can't handle. That's why I would be much more interested in having a "big" laptop, as in powerful CPU, tons of RAM, glorious screen. Could even be tempted to throw in a dedicated GPU. Don't care about it being 1 cm thin, featherweight and all-day battery. I do care about it not spinning up its fans when I'm just running vim in a console. I don't mind lugging around 2-3 kg of copper if that means the CPU can do a lot of work in silence.

I have a friend who's moving much more around, in meetings, etc. Her old macbook air is perfect for what she does. Also, the latest and greatest AMD wouldn't make a difference for her job, but she would clearly hate to lug around a heavy, bulky beast.

I think the issue is that, with today's technology, there's clearly no one size fits all. And there seems to be a trend in laptops to optimize for size and battery-life. Luckily, there are people for whom this is the right compromise. Don't know if they're the majority, but clearly there are other use-cases for which choices are more limited.

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

#419

Post by robotbikes »

rattray wrote: post #291
tastyfreeze wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why many workstation-class laptops DONT have a num pads. It is so annoying to have to type long sequences of digits without one.

This debate makes me wonder what it'd be like to have a keyboard layout in which the num pad is in the middle of the keyboard, such that on a qwerty keyboard Q-T, A-G, Z-V are on one side and Y-P, H-L, B-M on another, with the numbers in the middle (separated by a buffer space). I know this sounds crazy, but IME the worst part of keyboard ergonomics on mac laptops is that my hands are much closer together than my sho…

You could always get this e-ink keyboard that is being crowd-funded the nemeio where you can I guess completely customize the keys https://www.nemeio.com/ - seems interesting and could allow you to easily explore alternative layouts but not sure how good the ergonomics of a keyboard like that would be but it seems interesting to me.

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

#420

Post by lenkite »

eertami wrote: post #239
justaguy88 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could just be my sight It is 1080p to 4k is such a large difference

Really? On a 13" display? I bet in a blind AB test at a normal viewing distance you wouldn't even be able to accurately tell me which is which.

Can't find any results for 13" displays. But there have already been several blind tests carried out for TV's that show people can make out the difference.

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-1080p-201311153442.htm

https://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/comment-pa...

https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/4K-vs-8K--Who-can-tell-...

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