ASUS Laptop Platform Profile Support Under Review For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASUS Laptop Platform Profile Support Under Review For Linux

One of the features that has come together nicely for Linux on laptops in recent months has been the platform profile support around the ACPI specification with support from multiple laptop vendors for allowing users to control their power/performance preference based on various system profile configurations. A patch is pending for newer ASUS laptops to enjoy this platform profile control under Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ASUS-Platform-Profile-Linux

[polarathene]

Which laptop vendors can you rely on if they're not like System76 (or some Dell models) that have linux out of the box? Plenty of laptops with Windows on them can be had for a good price for the hardware but it's often a minefield compared to putting together a desktop.

I've had an MSI with a "Killer" NIC that refused to power on and be usable on Linux, turned out it was some power management thing Windows toggled on/off when it was booted/shutdown, you could go into settings and disable that but I was really surprised that there was no way to resolve that on Linux alone (none of the tools like ethtool were capable of it).

Then I got an Acer and that thing had the single NVMe disk with some Intel raid mode that prevented Linux installers even noticing the disk on the system. That required some undocumented keyboard shortcut (found from support thread on Acer forums for a different product) to reveal the disk mode in BIOS and change it to AHCI.

Then after installing that, the UEFI got corrupted and was whack to access, at one point the system appeared bricked, no screen output, couldn't access the UEFI, then after N power offs or leaving the battery to drain (I wasn't having much luck opening the thing up to temporarily remove the CMOS battery), it somehow sorted itself out and UEFI wasn't corrupt anymore.

Still had a problem with suspend, the 1st resume was ok, but the 2nd fails requiring power off. There's a firmware fix for it, but again that required Windows install to update, no UEFI updater or FWUPD on linux support.

---

What are good indicators of choosing / avoiding laptop vendors when you want a good deal but also want Linux (the Acer was budget and ran like a snail with Windows, fine with Linux, despite being a 2019Q3 model with Intel Comet Lake, it lacked eDP 1.3 or whatever it was for better power savings and that had been out for years, Acer cheaped out on the display panel AFAIK, info you can't easily get until you buy).

https://frame.work looks nice though, hopefully they do well so they can expand to other countries (I'm in NZ).

[vladimir86]

Sorry for my ignornce, but how is this different from controlling the cpu governor via cpupower pe?

to be fair, I am still using a 2016 laptop, so I can expect a lot of bs on newer laptops, a least judging by what I just read above me and MSI laptops.... but yeah, so far I have been controlling throttling with cpupower, which I think has been around since forever.

[Davidovitch]

Which laptop vendors can you rely on if they're not like System76 (or some Dell models) that have linux out of the box? Plenty of laptops with Windows on them can be had for a good price for the hardware but it's often a minefield compared to putting together a desktop.

In my experience you can't really rely on any vendor unless you wait for someone to review it (strongly recommended), or if it is marked as "linux supported". I also use https://linux-hardware.org/ to see if others have reported any problems with specific components of a given laptop.