Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On A $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop

[danmcgrew]

1 January, 2021 here--

This article was written 11 months ago; the Motile M141 seems to be a whale of a deal, all things considered. The M141 appears to be an outstanding $200 laptop, one that most people are continually looking for. The fact that it probably is constrained to 4 GB of RAM is not a consideration, since Michael Larabel (or one of the commenters here) has indicated that Linux can easily be run (I have been running a fairly modern version of Linux on a 2 GB laptop for several years, with no problems whatever); its mass storage is an SSD, as opposed to an eMMC unit--which usually shows up on 'economy' laptops; and the fact that all these specs mean that it is also a very good Windows machine (oh--and that has a 'run-time' of between three and seven hours, depending on loading; not too shabby for a $199 machine).


I went to Walmart's homepage, looking to see if I could buy one. There are only two listed, both refurbished; no new stock. Prices for the two refurbished units are ≈ $310 and $350.

Only two final words: very sad.

[RonJohn]

As of mid March 2020, it's $250 where I live.

[tg--]

Cost of manufacture to fit as socket is probably around $1 or lower, do you know the average cost of producing a pill in the pharmaceutical industry is about 5c ?

SODIMM sockets prices for you to peruse at your leisure

Manufactures will probably get a much better price than this as well, it's most likely some fucked up thing where they get a discount on W10 licences if they only put one SODIMM in, Microsoft has history in this department where the spec is kneecapped to give them volume licence price reduction.

So you just decided to ignore the whole reasoning I gave why the price increase would be higher then merely buying a SODIMM socket, and quote me partially to just show the SODIMM socket?

[tuxd3v]

"I will go powerpc this time"
For $199.00, right?
hehehe

On that you are right, it will be not for 199$ for instead for about 1500€, more or less..
Any way will be my first powerpc laptop, with a big boost to network, since its arch is big-endian

On the price, tough you are correct

[Slartifartblast]

Why is this a trick? This is a sub 300$ laptop, and to achieve this, they will of course have to keep cost down.
A second SODIMM socket actually increases price more than people expect.

Cost of manufacture to fit as socket is probably around $1 or lower, do you know the average cost of producing a pill in the pharmaceutical industry is about 5c ?

SODIMM sockets prices for you to peruse at your leisure

Manufactures will probably get a much better price than this as well, it's most likely some fucked up thing where they get a discount on W10 licences if they only put one SODIMM in, Microsoft has history in this department where the spec is kneecapped to give them volume licence price reduction.

[skeetre]

I don't understand all talk about single dimm, i haven't seen any ryzen based laptop where one couldn't add a second dimm.
I removed the 4gb that the came with my ryzen based laptop and added 8+8gb
I rather pay less for a laptop with single dimm and upgrade the memory myself than overpay for a laptop with dual dimm installed.

I agree... when you can. This laptop has been taken apart and shown to only have one dimm slot (which I agree at $200 is fine) but there are several other manufacturers with ~$250-$280 priced laptops with 2 dimm slots. But yeah, I'd much rather get a good deal like this and then upgrade the storage and ram myself... I've priced laptop builds that want $140+ for 8gb of ram, or to upgrade from 128gb to 256gb. Where for $140, you should get 16gb ram and 512gb PCIe nvme.

[Nille_kungen]

I don't understand all talk about single dimm, i haven't seen any ryzen based laptop where one couldn't add a second dimm.
I removed the 4gb that the came with my ryzen based laptop and added 8+8gb
I rather pay less for a laptop with single dimm and upgrade the memory myself than overpay for a laptop with dual dimm installed.

[tg--]

Sigh, one of the most annoying tricks done in lower end laptops, I'd rather they charge extra for a keyboard than kneecap the IGP's bandwidth capabilities as there isn't a damn thing you can do to address the situation.

Why is this a trick? This is a sub 300$ laptop, and to achieve this, they will of course have to keep cost down.
A second SODIMM socket actually increases price more than people expect.
Not only does the company need to spend additional money for the socket itself (which is fairly small), they also have to build it in the floor plan.
More importantly, another slot also means you have to route the > 200 traces, which in a design like this likely requires to go up from an 8 to a 10 layer board, which significantly increases cost.

I only accept this as valid criticism in a 600+ dollar device.
In a sub 300 dollar device with the lowest end graphics AMD has to offer, it isn't even a factor in anything but benchmarks.

[agriffis]

I can't answer about that laptop since i don't have that one.
But i do think it works in general.
Both hibernate and suspend works with my Acer with Ryzen 2500U.
For hibernate i need an swap file or partition and set resume= and resume_offset= in grub after that it works with no problem.

Thanks, that's good to know. Maybe sleep/resume is working more commonly under Linux. Last time I checked on laptops was a number of years ago, and it depended heavily on how well the manufacturer implemented ACPI in their BIOS.

[agriffis]

That's a very hard question to answer, as the 'sleep' and 'resume' capabilities are dependent on the particular distribution being used ON a particular laptop,, and not the laptop.

In my experience, sleep/resume is supported pretty much the same by the distributions, since it's mostly kernel.

How well it works depends mostly on the hardware manufacturer's ACPI and BIOS implementation. In the past it's been common for manufacturers to use their Windows drivers to work around bugs in their own ACPI implementation. When they do that, Linux sleep/resume is buggy, because the fixes are never put into the BIOS.

find a reviewer who is evaluating the distro you want on the laptop you want, AND who remembered to check the sleep and resume capability

Yeah, reviewers should include this. It's pretty critical in a laptop to have working suspend/resume.