Tips for a new laptop

[mbohets]

It did not take long to rule out SUSE.
The installation went well, but when I booted from the hard disk, the mouse froze, and it took me 3 reboots before I could log in.
After that, I poked around a bit in the menus and in yast, out of curiosity, and reinstalled Manjaro.
SUSE is definitely not my thing.

I just installed my Brother printer/scanner drivers, and everything works.
Next thing is to try to install the NVIDIA drivers, and prime to be able to switch between the CPU based Radeon Vega graphics and the NVIDIA 1660ti GPU.
When googling around, this seems to be somewhat tricky, and it needs all kinds of changes in config files.
I wonder if those changes are going to hold when there are kernel or other system updates ?
I also wonder if it is worth to start using the NVIDIA GPU, as I am not a gamer, I mainly chose this laptop because of the AMD CPU (more cores) and the reviews that it even outperforms some i9 CPUs,
because my goal is to run some VMs next to my daily normal office/multimedia usage.

It takes a bit of getting used to the other package management tools, but the advantage of Manjaro is that you can find very good technical documentation from Arch linux, on which Manjaro is based.

So to my regret, I will have to say goodbye to Kubuntu/Neon, which have served me very well for more than 10 years.
I'll come and look back to Neon later, when things have evolved a bit.

[mr_raider]

So I just got an Acer Swift Sf3 with the ryzen 4700u CPU.

I must say my experience has been flawless with KDE Neon. I just transferred the old SSD from my previous laptop with a 5 year old AMD CPU to the new one and everything works fine. I'm kernel 5.8 whicj now in the repos. I upgraded MEsa using kisak's PPA.

Granted I don't have hybrid grpahics with a switchable GPU, but AMD Renoir support is pretty good. Video accel works fine Kodi and some light games work in steam.

[mbohets]

I wonder if it is worth waking up the nvidia beast, as I am not a gamer, and it probably will increase power consumption.

[GreyGeek]

I wonder if it is worth waking up the nvidia beast, as I am not a gamer, and it probably will increase power consumption.

I can speak with experience on my own rig, which is now 8 years old. My secondary GPU, an Nvidia GT 650M, cannot be set as primary in the BIOS and the bumblebee stuff didn't run individual apps very well, if at all. When the Nvidia drivers started showing up in the repository I took a gamble and installed nvidi-342 (iirc) and it worked like a charm. From the moment I logged in the desktop and every application ran in accelerated graphics. Switching from rust to SSD's finished the speed enhancements. I let nvidia update automatically and it is currently at 390.138 and running like a champ. My desktop bootup time following the POST is 5 seconds. Applications start up 10X faster or more than they did before. Minecraft java used to give me a FPS of 20-30. Now I get 150-250 FPS depending on the particle count.

I could NOT return to the slowness this computer had before the Nvidia binary driver was installed.

A beast it is, but power consumption can depend on how you adjust the settings and what throttling levels you set. I installed a widget called "Thermal Monitor". it shows the temps of my CPU, GPU, and the two SSDs. Right now, with the Mincraft server running in the background for my grandson, the CPU is at 40C, the GPU is at 29C and my SSDs are at 28 and 26C respectively. I have adaptive clocking enabled and Nvidia set for performance mode. So when its acceleration is not needed it throttles down to a low power setting.

[mbohets]

Compared to my 7 yaers old Samsung laptop, this new laptop is already a speed monster,
but I guess it could't hurt trying it out.

At this moment my laptop has an average consumption of 35W, with a peak of 60W.

When installing the OS, I created a separated data partition, moved all user folders in my home directory to this partition, and created simlinks to the data partition in my home directory.
So if things go wrong whith the nvidia install, I can easily format the linux partition and reinstall the os, it does not take a lot of time

[mbohets]

I now Activated the NVIDIA drivers.
Contrary to my expectations, the power consumption of the laptop is now lower than before.
Without NVIDIA drivers: average consumption = 35W
With NVIDIA drivers: average consumption = 28W

Same conditions:
- Battery fully charged
- start the laptop, wait a bit until everything is loaded
- start Firefox and play the same youtube video

I was also surprised on how easy it was to change to the NVIDIA driver situation, because when I googled about installation of NVIDIA drivers,
I found all kinds of horror scenarios that describe how horribly wrong it can go and others that made it necessary to edit about a dozen configuration files.

Manjaro created an additional entry in the KDE system settings, called "Hardware configuration"
You see there what drivers are currently installed, and you get the choice to change to auto install either proprietary or open source drivers.
Select what you like and reboot after the installation finishes.