raymac46 Posted March 8, 2020 Share Posted March 8, 2020 Well after 5 years and a lot of frustration with my Lenovo Flex2-15D I have pulled the trigger on a new laptop (thanks to an an Amazon Canada sale.) This one is an ASUS Vivobook 15 and I am sticking with the AMD theme here - Ryzen R5-3500U, discrete Vega 8 GPU, 256GB SSD. This won't be the end of geeking it up though. I plan to convert the Lenovo over to Linux and finally decommission my daughter's old AMD Trinity HP Sleekbook with the broken hinge I have in the workroom. After I wipe the HDD on that junker, it'll be heading to recycling. More later. 2 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 8, 2020 Share Posted March 8, 2020 That should be a nice linux machine Always fun to play with new toys Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 8, 2020 Author Share Posted March 8, 2020 I have so much old tech around here. Maybe I was due to try something new. I haven't had an AMD Ryzen machine yet but I hear they are pretty impressive. What I'm hoping to get is wifi that doesn't crash every 20 minutes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 8, 2020 Share Posted March 8, 2020 My main machine has a AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and I think it performs quite nicely. I have never used a ryzen gpu before though but you should be fine. What is the exact model number of the one that you bought? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 8, 2020 Author Share Posted March 8, 2020 https://www.amazon.ca/Asus-F512DA-EB51-VivoBook-Light-Laptop/dp/B07QQB7552 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 8, 2020 Share Posted March 8, 2020 Ok, so ASUS VivoBook F512DA-EB51 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 8, 2020 Share Posted March 8, 2020 Quote It arrived today and I now have it fully setup. I am happy to say that everything works amazingly well. The backlit works and the hotkeys work too. I am also very happy to say that Fedora (with all my gnome extensions and extra stuff) runs very fast and it extremely snappy. Thank you all very much! https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/f4385d/just_got_a_new_laptop_to_use_as_my_linux_machine/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 9, 2020 Author Share Posted March 9, 2020 Doing a little IT in advance of the new laptop showing up today. I used dban to nuke the hard drive on my daughter's old HP laptop. It is really junk so I'll keep the adapter and send the laptop to the recycler. I have deleted Windows 10 and installed MX-19 on the Lenovo Flex2. I changed the UEFI to switch off Secure Boot. I didn't have to change from UEFI to Legacy since the MX Installer is smart enough to keep the EFI partition and install GRUB there. So I now have an actual UEFI Linux machine. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 9, 2020 Share Posted March 9, 2020 Nice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bookmem Posted March 9, 2020 Share Posted March 9, 2020 (edited) On 3/8/2020 at 9:14 AM, securitybreach said: My main machine has a AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and I think it performs quite nicely. I have never used a ryzen gpu before though but you should be fine. What is the exact model number of the one that you bought? I bought a Ryzen APU and when I first tried to install Mint, it choked on it. Apparently the kernel Mint 19.3 is using is too old to support its GPU. But I got it working by installing via compatibility mode and then updating the kernel. Edited March 9, 2020 by Bookmem Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 9, 2020 Share Posted March 9, 2020 Nice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 9, 2020 Author Share Posted March 9, 2020 Well no probs so far with AMD A8-6410. That's what is in the old laptop. Right now I am copying my photos over to it as another backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 13, 2020 Author Share Posted March 13, 2020 So far the new laptop is working great. The combination of Ryzen and ASUS appears to be offering great value. I'm confident this new machine would run Linux well but for now I am sticking with Windows 10. I have Eset and Malwarebytes subscriptions so I don't need to worry too much about malware. I find it handy to have a Windows laptop to refer to in case my neighborhood Windows users run into problems. The laptop is amazingly fast. Boots in about 10 seconds and shuts down in about 5. It has an NVME drive so all programs launch fast too. The display is IPS and the bezel around it is only about 6mm, so the whole package is thin and light. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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