I received my 14 inch Lafite AMD (Ryzen 7 8845HS) today. I purchased this laptop as I wanted something portable and powerful to use as a Linux workstation. I don't need a dedicated GPU, and having two m.2 NVMe slots is perfect for my needs.
The laptop is made of metal and feels good (premium). I was surprised at how light it is. The trackpad is nice and large, and the screen looks okay to my eyes. The keyboard is okay - not the best, but not bad either. The keys are well spaced (i.e. it doesn't have a tiny ENTER key like some laptops do). I can accurately type around 100 words per minute. Personally I prefer slightly more key-travel, but so far the typing experience has been great (I think I'm already used to the keyboard).
The BIOS is pretty simple, there aren't that many options there (for example, there's no option to change the amount of VRAM - it's stuck on 512MB).
I swapped out the MediaTek wifi card for an Intel AX210 as MediaTek cards have been "touch 'n go" for me with Linux in the past. It was a little awkward swapping out the wifi module because it's under the CMOS battery, which is held down by tape. The AX210 works well, this was from about 3 meters from the wifi router:
Installing Arch Linux (with KDE Plasma) was very straight forward. While there were no issues with the installation, I noticed a couple of things post-installation:
Looking at power consumption, I can extrapolate that I should be able to get around 8 hours (maybe even slightly more) of "light" usage on a full battery (i.e. just browsing the web, doing stuff in the terminal etc...).
Tomorrow I'm going to start installing the dev tools/IDEs I use, but so far, so good.
The laptop is made of metal and feels good (premium). I was surprised at how light it is. The trackpad is nice and large, and the screen looks okay to my eyes. The keyboard is okay - not the best, but not bad either. The keys are well spaced (i.e. it doesn't have a tiny ENTER key like some laptops do). I can accurately type around 100 words per minute. Personally I prefer slightly more key-travel, but so far the typing experience has been great (I think I'm already used to the keyboard).
The BIOS is pretty simple, there aren't that many options there (for example, there's no option to change the amount of VRAM - it's stuck on 512MB).
I swapped out the MediaTek wifi card for an Intel AX210 as MediaTek cards have been "touch 'n go" for me with Linux in the past. It was a little awkward swapping out the wifi module because it's under the CMOS battery, which is held down by tape. The AX210 works well, this was from about 3 meters from the wifi router:
Installing Arch Linux (with KDE Plasma) was very straight forward. While there were no issues with the installation, I noticed a couple of things post-installation:
- When the laptop went into sleep mode (with the lid open), it would immediately wake.
- There were a lot of micro-stutters with animations and scrolling (I've seen this on other AMD laptops).
- acpi.ec_no_wakeup=1
- amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x2
Looking at power consumption, I can extrapolate that I should be able to get around 8 hours (maybe even slightly more) of "light" usage on a full battery (i.e. just browsing the web, doing stuff in the terminal etc...).
Tomorrow I'm going to start installing the dev tools/IDEs I use, but so far, so good.
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