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Acer Is Launching In Germany What Could Be A Great AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Linux Laptop

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  • #11
    Originally posted by birdie View Post
    In terms of horrible build quality and cheap build materials Acer and Lenovo are leading the pack by a large margin and I have stopped recommending them years ago. Yeah, they are usually the cheapest.
    There is no such a thing as a cheap quality machine. All big manufactures, Dell, Asus, HP, Samsung, LG, etc, have crappy machines on their consumer line. I know because I do maintenance in them. None of them deserve a recommendation.

    That is why I recommended the enterprise line of Lenovo, even if they are used machines. They are still the go to machine for professionals, despite the fact that they are slowly turning their once excellent line into Apple's crapbooks.
    Last edited by M@GOid; 06 March 2020, 12:33 PM.

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    • #12
      I'm using an Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 2500U APU (https://www.notebooksbilliger.de/not...r9r4+comfyview) which looks almost exactly like this one.. got it on sale half a year ago for 519€. It works pretty well but has a strange problem since day one which causes it to not boot up sometimes (black screen). Then I need to power it off and on again and it works and is stable.

      Build quality is pretty good imo - The keyboard feels good, not cheap, battery is okay and it is completely silent on easy tasks like office, browsing and watching netflix. everything else also works as it should - but I always have to use custom kernel parameters "acpi_backlight=vendor" for backlight to work and "idle=nomwait" to prevent softlocks. I'm on Manjaro using the latest stable 5.5.6-1 kernel. I had some issues with 5.3 - 5.4 regarding wifi, but with 5.5 it seems stable again.

      The boot up thing is a bit annoying but all in all I'd say it was a good deal for me. Dunno how comparable my experience is though..

      Last edited by MadByte; 06 March 2020, 12:30 PM.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
        Other than the Thinkpad X1 Carbon (which sadly, I was very disappointed with), Lenovo's Thinkpad range is still the best (of an admittedly bad bunch). Whilst the build quality certainly isn't getting better, it is miles ahead of Lenovo's consumer range.

        It is strange, Acers have always felt cheap and plasticy to me but oddly enough they actually last pretty well. The plastic is scuffed but is fairly thick. The screw holes don't turn into dust.

        I am due a new laptop in about 3 years. By then the Thinkpad X390 will be well supported but if some of these Acer machines are still alive by then (and as cheap as an x390) then I am certainly not religious or loyal to any proprietary hardware manufacturer and might try one out.
        I share your sentiments towards Acer chassis plastic. Unfortunately the stuff they put inside it is not very durable. I bought my sister one years ago only to have to replace almost everything except the motherboard. But the chassis sure never cracked. Now she is using a Thinkpad T430 that I only had to replace the really old battery.

        Women tend to say Thinkpads are ugly, but whatever. If I'm the one doing the maintenance out of my pocket, they will have to learn to like it, or else.

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        • #14
          Aw no DisplayPort and no Wifi AC (which can be upgraded easily) otherwise good bang for the buck if looking at specs!

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          • #15
            Acer makes great chromebooks (I have two), hope their experiences will be carried to Ryzen 4000 series laptops. Really look forward to it!

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            • #16
              Best laptop Ever! INSTABUY!! (not instabuy... i don't have money now...)

              Take that 'Murica!

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              • #17
                Originally posted by Spacefish View Post
                Aw no DisplayPort and no Wifi AC (which can be upgraded easily) otherwise good bang for the buck if looking at specs!
                It does have AC. It isn't necessarily even possible to upgrade systems. Latest gen Intel systems now have soldered on Wifi chips.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by M@GOid View Post
                  There is no such a thing as a cheap quality machine. All big manufactures, Dell, Asus, HP, Samsung, LG, etc, have crappy machines on their consumer line. I know because I do maintenance in them. None of them deserve a recommendation.
                  That's a good point, it's the consumer product lines that are generally garbage build quality that flex and break if you look at them the wrong way. My experience is mainly around HP and Dell, and their consumer lines are trash, while the business product lines are built a lot more solidly, with metal frame and more durable plastics.

                  Also, the business product lines (e.g. Dell Precision) often have official Linux support, where all hardware "just works" because it's supported in mainline kernel. Consumer products typically don't, and often require crummy 3rd party drivers that may or may not work with your distro, for things like wifi, camera, sensors, keyboard backlight, sound, etc.

                  Edit: another benefit of the business products, is you can often find a good selection of used stuff on ebay from commercial liquidators. Consumer stuff is usually beat to hell and trashed after a few years, but a business laptop that has been sitting on someone's desk in a docking station will still look like new after a few years.
                  Last edited by torsionbar28; 06 March 2020, 03:16 PM.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by andrei_me View Post
                    Michael when AMD or their partners are confident of their hardware support in Linyx, they usually send you a sample, maybe this time they send a Renoir laptop, you might check with System76 if they have something
                    What I’m waiting on is for the Linux video drivers to be finally fixed. They managed to fix many problems on my laptop before it died but it still had the issue of the screen freezing up and the keyboard becoming non responsive. That was my laptop. So I built up an AMD machine with a 3800x processor and a 5500xt GPU. Guess what it does exactly the same thing!!!!!!!! It might go days or a few minutes.

                    while this isn’t a black screen that was common with the Windows drivers (the screen just freezes) I’m hoping the fixes they found for Windows applies to Linux. This issue has existed for a very long time now and really needs to be fixed. As a result I have to give a qualified warning to potential AMD / Linux users that the problem exists. Linux runs great on AMD hardware until it doesn’t then you have to reboot.

                    I intend to do a firmware update on the motherboard soon but I highly doubt that is the problem since the old laptop and the build run different hardware separated by a couple of years now. The common theme seems to be the AMD GPU.

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by torsionbar28 View Post
                      That's a good point, it's the consumer product lines that are generally garbage build quality that flex and break if you look at them the wrong way. My experience is mainly around HP and Dell, and their consumer lines are trash, while the business product lines are built a lot more solidly, with metal frame and more durable plastics.

                      Also, the business product lines (e.g. Dell Precision) often have official Linux support, where all hardware "just works" because it's supported in mainline kernel. Consumer products typically don't, and often require crummy 3rd party drivers that may or may not work with your distro, for things like wifi, camera, sensors, keyboard backlight, sound, etc.
                      I refuse to buy another HP. Quality sucks and the battery is a pain.

                      speaking of batteries if the manufactures can’t make them easy to get to and of standard format then they really need to be externally replaceable. The idea of putting a battery in a device that barely last a year and the requires a magician to swap out is a joke. You would think that the idiots in the EU worried about battery charges for cell phones would address this issue. It has become a problem for machines personally owned and for machines at work.

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