New laptop experience (Fedora on HP Omnibook Ultra 14 - Ryzen AI 365, "Strix Point")

New year, new blog post! Fedora's going great...41 came out and seems to be getting good reviews, there's exciting stuff going on with atomic/bootc, we're getting a new forge, it's an exciting time to be alive...

Personally I've spent a large chunk of the last few weeks bashing my head against two awkward bugs - one kernel bug, one systemd bug. It's a bit of a slog, but hey. Also now working up to our next big openQA project, extending test coverage for the new installer.

But also! I bought myself a new laptop. For the last couple of years I've been using a Dell XPS 13 9315, the Alder Lake generation. I've been using various generations of XPS 13 ever since Sony stopped making laptops (previously I used a 2010 Vaio Z) - I always found it to be the best thin-and-light design, and this one was definitely that. But over time it felt really underpowered. Some of this is the fault of modern apps. I have to run a dumb amount of modern chat apps, and while they're much nicer than IRC, they sure use a lot more resources than hexchat. Of course I have a browser with about 50 tabs open at all times, Evolution uses quite a lot of memory for my email setup for some reason, and I have to run VMs quite often for my work obviously. Put all that together, and...I was often running out of RAM despite having 16GB, which is pretty ridiculous. But even aside from that, you could tell the CPU was just struggling with everything. Just being in a video chat was hard work for it (if I switched apps too much while in a meeting, my audio would start chopping up for others on the call). Running more than two VMs tend to hang the system irretrievably. Just normal use often caused the fan to spin up pretty high. And the battery life wasn't great. It got better with kernel updates over time, but still only 3-4 hours probably.

So I figured I'd throw some hardware at the problem. I've been following all the chipset releases over the last couple of years, and decided I wanted to get something with AMD's latest silicon, codenamed "Strix Point", the Ryzen AI 3xx chips. They're not massively higher-performing than the previous gen, but the battery life seems to be improved, and they have somewhat better GPUs. That pretty much brought it down to the Asus Vivobook S 14, HP Omnibook Ultra 14, and Lenovo T14S gen 6 AMD. The Asus is stuck with 24GB of RAM max and I'm not a huge Asus fan in general, and the HP came in like $600 cheaper than the Thinkpad with equivalent specs, and had a 3 year warranty included. So I went with the HP, with 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM.

I really like the system as a whole. It's heavier than the XPS 13, obviously, the bezels are a little bigger, and the screen is glossier. But the screen is pretty nice, I like the keyboard, and the overall build quality feels pretty solid. The trackpad seems fine.

As for running Fedora (and Linux in general) on it...well, it's almost great. Everything more or less works out of the box, except the fingerprint reader. I don't care about that because I set up the reader on the XPS 13 and kinda hated it; it's nowhere near as nice as a fingerprint reader on a phone. Even if it worked on the HP I'd leave it off. The performance is fantastic (except that Google office sites perform weirdly terribly on Firefox, haven't tried on Chromium yet).

But...after using it for a while, the issues become apparent. The first one I hit is that the system seems to hang pretty reproducibly playing video in browsers. This seems to be affecting pretty much everyone with a Strix Point system, and the only 'fix' is to turn off hardware video acceleration in the browser, which isn't really great (it means playing video will use the CPU, hurting battery life and performance). Then I found even with that workaround applied the system would hang occasionally. Looking at the list of Strix Point issues on the AMD issue tracker, I found a few that recommended kernel parameters to disable various features of the GPU to work around this; I'm running with amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x800, which disables idle power states for the GPU, which probably hurts battery life pretty bad. Haven't had a hang with that yet, but we'll see. But aside from that, I'm also having issues with docks. I have a Caldigit TS3+, which was probably overpowered for what I really need, but worked great with the XPS 13. I have a keyboard, camera, headset, ethernet and monitor connected to it. With the HP, I find that at encryption passphrase entry during boot (so, in the initramfs) the keyboard works fine, but once I reach the OS proper, only the monitor works. Nothing else attached to the dock works at all. A couple of times, suspending the system and resuming it seemed to make it start working - but then I tried that a couple more times and it didn't work. I have another Caldigit dock in the basement; tried that, same deal. Then I tried my cheap no-name travel hub (which just has power pass-through, an HDMI port, and one USB-A port on it) with a USB-A hub, and...at first it worked fine! But then I suspended and resumed and the camera and headset stopped working. Keyboard still worked. Sigh. I've ordered a mid-range hub with HDMI, ethernet, a card reader and four USB-A ports on it off Amazon, so I won't need the USB-A hub daisychain any more...I'm hoping that'll work well enough. If not, it's a bit awkward.

So, so far it's a bit of a frustrating experience. It could clearly be a fantastic Linux laptop, but it isn't quite one yet. I'd probably recommend holding off for a bit while the upstream devs (hopefully) shake out all the bugs...