I am in the market for a new laptop. I have searched quite a lot and decided to go with Lenovo. I am connected to mains most of the time and I am looking for compute power over efficiency. So the new Intel Lunar Lake 258V processors are not for me. That means Zenbook S14 is out of discussion. Also before anyone push a Framework plug, No! Framework laptops are not available where I live.
Its for my personal use and my preferred setup is Gnome on EndeavourOS. and its mainly used as a media consumption device. But occasionally it could run ffmpeg h265 encoding, run one or two moderately heavy podman containers (like Jellyfin) and sometimes a 6GB RAM VM or a local LLM model (3b) (very rare).
Basically I have narrowed it down to two laptops:
Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14, AMD) - AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 (Preferred)
Lenovo ThinkPad P14s (AMD) Gen 5 - Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS
With Yoga Pro 7 being my preferred pick. When similarly specked with 32GB RAM, both are almost similarly priced, with Yoga running about $200 extra. I feel that new ThinkPads are a little overpriced for what they offer, at-least where I live.
Yoga has the new AMD architecture (Zen 5).
Yoga's screen is better than ThinkPad's (2.8K OLED @ 120Hz vs FHD IPS @ 60Hz, OLED option is not available for ThinkPad here).
Yoga has an Aluminum build. I haven't used ThinkPads in the past, but had a plastic Dell Latitude in the recently (2022) and its build quality and plastics were really bad. Currently I have an Aluminum built laptop (from 2018) and its so much better than Dell's.
I prefer the aesthetics of Yoga over ThinkPad (Though its subjective).
ThinkPad is a bit cheaper (by $200) and upgradable.
Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14, AMD) being very new, I don't know about its Linux (EndeavourOS) compatibility.
On the other hand, the ThinkPad P14s (AMD) Gen 5 works well with Arch with Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS. This puts me in a dilemma, should I spend a little more and for the not heavily Linux tested, but new Strix Point (Ryzen 300 series) Yoga Pro 7 or go for a tested Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS ThinkPad?
I am planing to keep my laptop for 5-6 years.
If anybody have the new gen AMD processor Laptops running Linux (Any Distro) please share your experience.
What, you don't think Strix Point AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 Yoga Pro 7 is easy to say? Which part of Strix Point AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 Yoga Pro 7 do you dislike so much? If anything Strix Point AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 Yoga Pro 7, or how I like to call it, SPARA9365YP7, flows pretty well, as far as I'm concerned.