this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

You might recall that I was considering a MNT Reform laptop to replace my crappy HP laptop a few months ago.

Well, I got no answer or information of any kind anywhere (not just here on Lemmy), but the idea kept going round and round in the back of my head. And now, 5 months later, I find myself having to upgrade Mint to Wilma on my hateful HP laptop soon, and I already dread rebooting to the console because Xorg is dead again, having to downgrade to a working version of the kernel again, fighting the AMDGPU driver again, making the super-flaky and completely terrible wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek 8821CE adapter work halfway decently again...

I hate this laptop. In fact, I hate it so much that I finally pulled the trigger on the MNT Reform laptop. Hopefully it'll get here before the need to upgrade becomes too pressing.

Stay tuned ๐Ÿ™‚

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you're using an AMD iGPU you should really consider one of the Wayland options.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I tried it. It's unstable either way. Not to mention, I can't really do Wayland because I have software I use all the time that rely on X.

The problem is the driver with the AMD Radeon Vega 6 chipset: it's an older chipset and it's not well supported by either the amdgpu or amdgpu pro drivers. I mean it works well enough most of the time, but every once in a while, it starts corrupting the display so bad I have to reboot. It usually happens when waking up from sleep or - strangly - when taking a screenshot with Flameshot (really weird that one).

I am reliably told that newer AMD stuff is better supported. That's great. But AMD obviously doesn't care about supporting the older Vega 6 chipset anymore, and I'm not exactly keen on debugging the open-source amdgpu driver to get better performances on a laptop that has other issues and that I can't stand anyway.