Reading this now on a ROG Zephyrus G14 ($1,449)[1] running Arch. I've had a few random lockups with Linux 5.6.4, though they seem to have become less frequent with amd-ucode and a bios update. Additionally, I haven't had any problems with 5.7rc1, though the proprietary Nvidia driver (440.82) doesn't compile with that kernel yet.
Otherwise, it's been running great. The screen looks great, the touchpad feels really good, and the performance is amazing. The biggest complaint I have at the moment is the lack of PgUp/Dn and Home/End keys.
The machine definitely looks tempting, but based on the mostly failed attempts by Ars Technica to run Linux on it, I had stopped looking at it. But perhaps the kernels they used were too old. Still, for that price, I would expect it to work without issues, as I really would buy it as a Linux machine. How is your experience, Ars had problems with the fans running too high and the battery not lasting as long as it should?
I generally avoid Ubuntu, but I'm not looking for an out-of-the-box perfect experience, and I like new hardware.
The unfortunate reality is that hardware vendors, not OS vendors, provide software support for their hardware. Additionally, Linux is a minuscule portion of the desktop/laptop market, and hardware vendors can't justify dropping as much money on Linux as they do for Windows.
Still, plenty of hobbyists are happy to develop for, test, reverse engineer, and support good hardware, but using Linux on a new platform generally means being on the bleeding edge, which is one of the reasons I like Arch. It also means participating in mailing list discussions, diving into various software projects, and testing and submitting patches.
So far, the experience has been mixed, but positive. Like I said, I've experienced a few random lockups, mostly at first. The fans have been working as expected on Linux 5.6.4. Even now, I'm compiling Chromium (for VA-API support), which usually takes an hour or two even on a Threadripper 1950X, and they only spin up occasionally.
The battery life at the moment is generally either 2-3 hours (~35W-40W power usage), or 7-10 hours (~7W-10W), depending on hardware usage. This is close to what I've seen from reviewers using Windows, though not quite as good. I expect that to get better as Nvidia improves their dynamic power management, and software support for Linux gets better.
Regardless, if you want to play with new hardware, use a rolling release distro, or figure out how to compile newer versions of the packages that come with your distro.
Thanks for your feedback. I would be using Fedora, so a pretty up-to-date distro. I don't mind a bit tinkering, but don't consider sys-admin stuff a hobby :). So I am very keen on reports, how far the support for this hardware is, as it would be bad, if I end up not really being able to use Linux after buying the machine for this purpose.
But your report is encouraging, especially that the fans are not too noisy and the battery runtime is as expected - no laptop runs long when on full steam. But for casual use, the time you are getting sounds good - more than enough. I don't need the ultimate runtimes on battery, as long as it is quite a bit longer than the 2 hours Ars Technica got. So you have me definitely tempted :)
Unsolved, but with exciting new progress. I've gotten PRIME running on my new ROG Zephyrus G14, and all I have to do to run applications on the dGPU is use "prime-run". Dynamic power management also shuts down the GPU when it's not in use.
Everything with an iGPU will just work. If you have a dGPU and don't setup render offloading, you won't use it (unless you connect to an external screen and reload with dGPU drivers to directly output). That being said, nouveau "works" as a replacement for nvidia shenanigans at a colossal performance compromise.
