AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX / ASUS ROG Strix G15 Is A Nicer Experience On Ubuntu 21.10

Earlier this week I posted benchmarks showing how Intel Tiger Lake performance has improved nicely for Ubuntu 21.10 compared to Ubuntu 21.04. Of course, readers immediately wondered whether this also applied on the AMD laptop side... So here are some tests using an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop under Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and then also looking at running Linux 5.15 + Mesa 21.3-devel Git for an even more bleeding edge experience.

Ubuntu 21.10 is a big deal for newer AMD laptops not necessarily about the performance but for features. For the ASUS ROG Strix G15 used for testing, Ubuntu 21.10 provides a much better out-of-the-box experience. As covered earlier this year in the initial Ryzen 9 5900HX / G15 Linux testing, Ubuntu 21.04 when booted had WiFi troubles and also some annoying keyboard issues (prompting to shutdown the system at each key press event). That earlier article noted how with newer firmware and the Linux kernel these problems could be worked around, but fortunately now with Ubuntu 21.10 is a clean out-of-the-box experience.

Booting to the Ubuntu 21.10 daily ISO there were no worries about the keyboard or WiFi and all the key functionality is in place. Ubuntu 21.10 is shipping with Linux 5.13 by default or on Linux 5.15 is even more AMD work including to have Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring support and other bits in place. Additionally, Linux 5.15 has ASUS laptop WMI driver improvements to now also expose working ACPI platform profile support for capable AMD laptops such as the ROG Strix G15.

So long story short, even before getting to the benchmarks, Ubuntu 21.10 is already an improvement for users with a more pleasant out-of-the-box experience but too bad there wasn't this level of Linux support at launch.

On this AMD Advantage laptop Ubuntu 21.04 was benchmarked with all stable release updates, Ubuntu 21.10 in its daily ISO form as of 5 October, and running Ubuntu 21.10 but upgrading to Linux 5.15 Git by way of the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA and also switching to Mesa 21.3-devel via the Oibaf PPA.