HP ProBook 470 G2 Linux compatability

[Steven Rosenberg]

To be honest, when it comes to REALLY new hardware, there is so much
of if, and so few people out there to report back on whether or not it
works with distros x, y and z, that it's pretty much a crapshoot.

Of course Lenovo Thinkpads get a lot of developer heat, so it's a good
bet that they will get support sooner.

I have an HP Pavilion g6, specifically a g6-2210us, and while there
are reports here and there on other g6's, I have yet to find anybody
using the 2210us in Linux and writing about it. And I've had the
laptop a year and a half.

This runs an AMD APU, and I was able to get pretty good video
performance with AMD Catalyst rather quickly. Maybe six to nine months
in, things began to improve with the open Radeon driver.

Remember, this was all in Fedora, where new kernels ship often enough
to keep the good stuff flowing in.

The progress with Radeon has been rapid enough that while Catalyst is
better in some ways (runs maybe 10 degrees F cooler), actual video
performance is overall equal in Radeon -- and, in the case of watching
video in VLC, better with Radeon than Catalyst, which really surprised
me.

Getting suspend/resume working is hackish, with a mix of tips from
blogs and Fedora bug reports getting me where I am today, with good
video performance and working suspend/resume in the open driver.

Again, it took me a year and a half to get to this point. Things
always worked, but they are better now by far and have been improving
at a fairly rapid clip.

Now I can tell from looking at changelogs that the newer, more
expensive AMD APUs get a lot more attention than the cheaper, older
one in my laptop -- again probably due to more developers having
newer, more expensive laptops.

It's easy to say, "just buy what other people have," but the
recommended hardware on blogs, forums, mailing lists, etc., rapidly
ages out of what you can actually buy new at any given time.

So I still say, it's a crapshoot ... but with a lot of luck and/or
effort, you can usually make things work.


--
Steven Rosenberg
http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog
http://blogs.dailynews.com/click


On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 6:38 AM, Gary Stainburn
<gary.stainburn at ringways.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm looking at getting work to finally replace my old DELL Vostro and I'm
> looking at the above laptop.
>
> I would love to hear people's opinion of this kit regarding compatability and
> stability with Linux. To be fair, I would imagine most laptops would be an
> improvement on my Vostro where kernel updates keep breaking the WIFI and I
> still haven't managed to get the built n cam working after all these years.
>
> The dist will probably be Fedora not not necessarily - I fount the recent
> thread on low maintenance laptops quite interesting.
>
> To be honest, the main thing is having a high enough resolution, and I'm
> pretty open minded regarding everything else so other suggestions would also
> be welcome
>
> Gary
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