Arch Linux, Clear Linux, Fedora Compete On The ASUS ROG Strix G15

Following last month's look at the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and some of the initial hurdles seen on Ubuntu, readers were curious about how well other Linux distributions fared compatibility wise or if offering better performance elsewhere. Here are some tests across Arch Linux, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation, and Ubuntu 21.04 for reference.

When it comes to compatibility, each tested distribution worked fine when going through all available updates and getting to Linux 5.13 (or at least the latest Linux 5.12 point release on Clear Linux). The latest linux-firmware.git is also necessary if not shipped by the distribution in order to have working WiFi. The support criteria is basically what was laid out in the prior article on the ASUS ROG Strix G15. Basically, the newer the software components, the better.

All four Linux distributions worked fine when having all of these updates in place for this laptop that sports the Ryzen 9 5900HX with integrated graphics and discrete Radeon RX 6800M, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB Samsung NVMe SSD.

With these four Linux distributions various benchmarks were carried out to see if any one of them offers decisively better performance than the rest for this AMD Advantage laptop.