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Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

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Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#91

Post by terminous »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #63
terminous wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> biz users are email and a few small spreadsheets. I don't get why biz users need multicore anything. Have you opened a Chrome or Electron app recently? And many biz users need to run those apps while on Zoom with a virtual background for the camera. Based on your logic, all most biz users really need for email and spreadsheets can be done using Lotus Notes / 1-2-3 on a single-core IBM 5150 with 5 MHZ and 256KB of m…

I'm not sure if this is a stupid attempt at a rebuttal, or if you've accidentally made a rather good point as well. BTW My home machine is a decade-old dual core and it runs email, web and all of Libreofffice just fine, and with 90% of its mem unused.

> I'm not sure if this is a stupid attempt at a rebuttal, or if you've accidentally made a rather good point as well.

How about you stop making personal attacks?

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#92

Post by _a_a_a_ »

terminous wrote: post #91
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if this is a stupid attempt at a rebuttal, or if you've accidentally made a rather good point as well. BTW My home machine is a decade-old dual core and it runs email, web and all of Libreofffice just fine, and with 90% of its mem unused.

> I'm not sure if this is a stupid attempt at a rebuttal, or if you've accidentally made a rather good point as well. How about you stop making personal attacks?

> using Lotus Notes / 1-2-3 on a single-core IBM 5150 with 5 MHZ and 256KB of memory

That was a ridiculous interpretation of what I asked so how about not strawmanning people asking questions. And BTW I gave you the spec of my current machine which you ignored.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#93

Post by JonChesterfield »

john_miller wrote: post #22
JonChesterfield wrote: post #3

Happy to see the refresh. These APU systems are great. The alarmingly priced usb-c dock works. Three monitors around laptop, no problem. The LTE modem works out of the box on windows and works with some arguing on Linux (I built a driver from GitHub, but that's probably improved since). An not-obvious benefit of the Lenovo ones is they're on the approved list for AMD's employees, so broken stuff is pretty immediately…

What's the battery life like on linux?

Eight or ten hours? I don't take a power cable with me for the day. Would probably be better if I worked out how to set any of the power saving things, this is Debian out of the box. That's mostly showing emacs, I expect it would be worse with a browser.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#94

Post by _d3Xt3r_ »

reacharavindh wrote: post #78
gramakri2 wrote: post #47

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 goo…

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…

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.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#95

Post by _d3Xt3r_ »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #93
john_miller wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the battery life like on linux?

Eight or ten hours? I don't take a power cable with me for the day. Would probably be better if I worked out how to set any of the power saving things, this is Debian out of the box. That's mostly showing emacs, I expect it would be worse with a browser.

I'm on a Zen3+ APU (Thinkpad Z13) and TLP has worked great for me. TLP has nice out-of-the-box defaults so you don't need to tweak anything if you'd like, but you may need to disable any existing power management systems, if you're using a full-fledged DE, as they could conflict.

Two cool things that TLP does is allow you to set battery charge thresholds for better battery longevity (I limit mine to 80%), the other being automatically changing the energy performance preference (EPP) in the amd-pstate driver, so if you're on battery you could get it to automatically switch to power saving or balanced powersaving etc. I get an 8-10 hr battery life even with the 80% cap capacity, with several MS webapps running in Edge (Wayland), including Teams and Outlook, VS codium and Firefox running in the background.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#96

Post by MrRolleyes »

throw0101c wrote: post #33
MrRolleyes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacBook doesn't have an LTE modem.

What does an in-built modem give over a separate hotspot or smartphone tethering (which most people always have with them)?

[dead]

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#97

Post by scottapotamas »

throw0101c wrote: post #33
MrRolleyes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacBook doesn't have an LTE modem.

What does an in-built modem give over a separate hotspot or smartphone tethering (which most people always have with them)?

The ability for corporate IT to better control how their devices connect to the internet, and/or not requiring a work phone to be supplied.

I've seen issued laptops coming with cellular data + persistent tunnel as the default connection method over allowing use of client/public/site WiFi networks.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

#98

Post by calvinmorrison »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #9
calvinmorrison wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my Lenovo dock. Still itches my design scratch and is super reliable. Least reliable part is just the USB c cables as usual

I don't think I'd have bought one out of my own money. It was something like $500, rather close to the cost of a standalone computer. But it's now cable tied to the back of a monitor and the single usb cable to the laptop for power and everything else is aesthetically glorious.

hah I got it from work! Lol
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