Last year I asked the community about Linux compatibility on laptops with dual AMD graphics cards.
I learned that older dual AMD GPU laptops work well with Linux, and after further conversations with friends, I bought the AMD laptop mentioned in the original post.
I feel like I can give some feedback. Although this laptop may only be sold in mainland China, there are some laptops on the international market that use similar or identical hardware configurations.
Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20241013
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.7.0
Qt Version: 6.7.3
Kernel Version: 6.11.2-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 Ă— AMD Ryzen 7 7840H w/ Radeon 780M Graphics
Memory: 14.8 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon 780M
Manufacturer: METAPHYUNI
Product Name: MetamechBook
In terms of actual experience, despite being a laptop made by a small manufacturer, it is surprisingly compatible with Linux, and almost all of the hardware works as expected:
Display
Sound
Camera
CPU/GPU performance control
Bluetooth
Keyboard
SSD
Graphics card
Ethernet
USB port
Wireless network (I replaced the wireless card with Intel AX210)
Fan speed control
RAID0
TPM encryption
- Regarding RAID, the motherboard provides this function, but I haven’t tried it, so I’m not sure whether it works properly.
- The fan speed cannot be controlled, and even on Windows, you can only select three fixed fan speeds through the driver provided by the manufacturer. Presumably, the manufacturer has written the fan speed curve into the firmware, but the fan speed follows the system’s current performance settings, and the system’s performance mode can be adjusted in KDE through the power management scheme.
- I haven’t tried the TPM2 chip-based secure boot and other features, and the manufacturer has disabled this feature, so I don’t know how the encryption experience is on this device.
Regarding the graphics card switching issue that I was worried about before, it is actually not a problem because it is handled very directly (just change an environment variable DRI_PRIME):
poplar@c004-h1:~> DRI_PRIME=0 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon 780M (radeonsi, gfx1103_r1, LLVM 18.1.8, DRM 3.59, 6.11.2-1-default)
poplar@c004-h1:~> DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT (radeonsi, navi33, LLVM 18.1.8, DRM 3.59, 6.11.2-1-default)
No reboot is required, no root privileges are required, and no switching to an X11 session is required. Also the laptop works fine in full wayland session.
That’s awesome!
