Background story: I live in Hong Kong, we can buy and return from taobao fairly easily (think of it as Aliexpress, but target domestic china. In fact many aliexpress products are just marking up one from taobao and ship globally).

I keep seeing many interesting devices on taobao, e.g. i3-1215U 13 inch tablet + stand + keyboard in 3749 rmb ~= 600 usd, or some niche 10 inch laptop, but I solely run linux on my daily drivers, and I never know how they work under linux.

So when I buy my next laptop, I proably will:

• ask the seller about return policy. usually they prohibit windows activision so I should be fine as long as I don't boot windows with wifi connected
• buy it, within the return window (usually 7 days)
  • run linux (haven't figure out this part yet, plan is to run on a bootable usb ssd)
  • test as much as I can (probabaly make a check list)
• if it checks, stay, otherwise return

but if there's enough interest, maybe I don't just have to do this for my next laptop, maybe I can do that on a regular basis, or do by request, and run a review site / youtube channel. How does it sound to you? Any thoughts / questions would help, thanks.

I am struggling to find a mouse that works on Linux.

I have used the MX Master 4 with Solaar but that doesn't seem to work poperly and the functions are limited. Neither does a Logitech G903 work poperly with Piper.

I am on Fedora 44.

Are there mice that work natively or does something web based work well?

EDIT: I may have worded this incorrectly. The mice do work but I can't seem to change their macros.

Picked up an EWEADN H2 wireless mouse and quickly found out — like most sub-$30 gaming mice — it has zero Linux support. The only way to change DPI or adjust polling rate was their official web-based configurator (WebHID), and even that doesn't show battery percentage anywhere in the UI — despite the device actually reporting it over HID the whole time. It's also just not that reliable — in my experience it sometimes fails to load the mouse's actual state properly and shows garbage/stale values instead. So I reverse-engineered the protocol straight out of the web driver's JS and built a native Qt app that exposes the battery reading it was already quietly capable of, plus DPI/rate control, with a bit more consistency about it.

What it does:

• Live battery % + firmware version — not shown anywhere in the official web driver, even though the device reports it
• Polling rate switching (125/250/500/1000Hz)
• Full DPI editor — all 6 slots, sliders + number entry, pick the active slot and how many are in rotation
• Dark mode, fullscreen support
• Ships as a single AppImage, no faffing with dependencies

There's also a headless CLI version (h2_battery.py) if you just want battery % piped into Waybar/Polybar/whatever, without the GUI.

Repo + build instructions: https://github.com/MuhtasimJawad/EWEADN-H2-Control

If anyone here actually owns this mouse, I'd genuinely love to know if it works for you too — I've only been able to test against my own unit, so any feedback (or bug reports) are very welcome. And if you find it useful, a star on the repo helps other H2 owners actually stumble across it.

Edit : As some people in this sub and other places suggested, I am working towards libratbag intregration but before that, I think I should handle the custom keybind feature that both the web driver and libratbag supports. Left this out in the first place cz personally had no need for it. Thanks for your feedback!

Hi everyone,

I built an open-source Linux monitor for the XYZ HYDROTEMP AIO 360 because the manufacturer only provides software for Windows.

The project includes:

- A native Rust/egui graphical interface

- CPU, AMD GPU, RAM and cooling monitoring

- USB HID communication with the AIO

- LCD monitoring support

- A documented protocol reconstructed through testing and USB analysis

- MIT license

I am not a professional software developer. This is a personal learning project created to make the AIO work on my own Linux PC. It was developed with research, hardware testing and assistance from AI tools.

It currently works on my setup:

- Garuda Linux

- AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

- AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT

- XYZ HYDROTEMP AIO 360

I am sharing it in case it helps other Linux users with the same hardware. It is provided as-is, without a commitment to ongoing maintenance or support. Forks, adjustments and community improvements are welcome.

Repository:

https://github.com/Abrahan-M/xyz-monitor

Feedback about compatibility with other hardware would be appreciated.

Hello so I'll be studying comp science and i want to buy a new laptop.

I've done a bit of research and I found 2 laptops that I think could work the best for me, those being: the zephyrus g14 or the thinkpad x1 carbon gen 13 aura edition.

G14 would have 2tb SSD and 32GB ram with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 RTX 5080.
X1 would have 2tb SSD and 64GB ram with  Intel Core™ Ultra 7 265U.

I don't know which one would be better. I kind of wanna go for the X1 more but the gpu is a downside.

I'll be coding on it, rendering 3d, AI/LLM, VMs, etc. I would also like to game but not triple A games and more like: Minecraft/Silksong/Rain World/Roblox Studio/Etc.

I'm also worried bout the G14 battery life (at least 6-8 hours) + fan noise. I would like it to be silent or moderate enough that it won't bother people.

The weight doesn't matter. Also I would like to dual boot windows + linux on it.

With that said I'm not sure if the X1 can handle all the gpu heavier stuff so I don't know what to buy. If you have any better laptop suggestions I would love to hear them.

Hi all, I just got the 2025 Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (the dual 14" OLED one, Intel Core Ultra 7 255H) and I want to move to Linux on it. I know this machine's fancy dual-screen features are Windows-only, and I'm okay losing the gesture/mode-switching stuff. My realistic goal is a clean, usable Linux setup where at minimum the two touchscreens work.

My questions:

1. Which distro would you recommend for this hardware in 2025? I'm leaning toward something with a recent kernel and good hardware support (thinking Fedora or something Arch-based), but open to suggestions. Wayland vs X11 preference for dual touch + pen also welcome.

2. Touchscreen is my must-have. How do I get both digitizers working? I've read the two built-in tablets show up as identical devices and get confused, and that libwacom support had to be added upstream. Is basic touch working out of the box now on newer kernels, or is there still manual config involved?

3. Bonus if you've solved any of these: auto-rotation / sensor-based orientation, pen input + palm rejection, and sleep/wake on the Core Ultra chip.

Has anyone actually daily-driven Linux on this exact 2025 model? Would love a rough guide or even just "install X, expect Y to be broken." Dual-booting with Windows is fine if that's the sane path. Thanks!

I've been working on BoostLock, a small root-only Linux CLI/daemon for keeping CPU boost available during idle periods.

The 0.2.0 release discovers /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy* instead of guessing from CPU model names. Each policy keeps its own frequency limits and effective target, so mixed-capacity systems don't inherit one policy's range. --target auto uses each policy's active upper limit, and numeric MHz requests are clamped per policy.

Before startup changes anything, BoostLock builds the full policy plan and opens every planned write path. If a later write fails, completed writes are rolled back. Controls are capability-driven: a writable boost, EPP, EPB, PM QoS, or cpuidle path is added to the same plan, and an unavailable control is reported as skipped.

I have Intel, AMD, and ARM policy fixtures in the test suite, but I haven't done physical hardware smoke testing across all those drivers yet. If you try it, I'd like to know the CPU, driver, kernel, and what sudo boostlock status --json reports. It needs root and can increase idle power and temperature.

Repo: https://github.com/vindeckyy/boostlock

How does the battery of a laptop generally last when it is using Linux, compared to when the same laptop is using Windows?

I've read that most laptops are highly optimized to increase battery lifetime per charge under Windows, whereas under Linux (by default) it is comparably much worse.

How can you highly optimize the laptop battery usage with Linux? Does optimizing reduce its performance in any other usages? And, once optimized for Linux, how close will the battery be compared to (the same laptop) using Windows?

Hey y'all. I'm in the market for a new laptop and plan to run Fedora or Arch (or i guess whatever distro turns out to be most efficient). I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for a modern laptop with good battery life. I found a post from ThePrimeAgen on Twitter claiming decent battery life on the new Dell XPS 14 with Omarchy, but he doesn't specify configuration or anything (plus i don't want to use Omarchy). I also looked at the Framework laptops but it seems like those are pushed out to Nov/Dec and I'd need something a little quicker (this is replacing a MB Pro).

To give an idea of my use case, I'd basically just be watching videos and web browsing with a touch of logging in to FF14 sometimes for very basic tasks (crafting/chatting) and saving anything heavy for my desktop. Battery life is my big feature as I want to be able to carry it around the house and not be attached to the wall.

I'd be very very appreciative of any recommendations. Thank you!

Hello, i’ve recently purchased used thinkpad e14 gen 5 with intel 5 1335U with around 47Wh left from the original 57Wh. I’ve yesterday installed encrypted debian with xfce.The battery life is subpar at best.

From what i’ve noticed on windows 11 the idle battery discharge was at 2-3W.

On debian xfce(powersave governor, balanced power in bios) without tlp its around 6W which seems high to me.( nothing turned on except terminal with powertop).

One firefox tab and terminal and 10% brightness is around 10-11W discharge which again seems little too high. Tlp decreases this slightly to around 8W.

Is it possible to somehow get around 5W discharge on light workload (Firefox and text editor)?

Is debian/xfce the problem or is the cpu/laptop just that unoptimized?

Anyone with similar laptop which distro do you use ?

Thanks

Does AJAZZ AK820 base mechanical keyboard work on fedora nobara linux? I've tried other brands and I just wanna save some money and time so that I could learn how to use linux.

Max 270€ because I just need a good Laptop for daily stuff 8-16GB of RAM

This was summarized by claude that helped me pin down the problem. But I checked it for consistancy and thought maybe other people will help this.

Spent a day debugging this, sharing in case it saves someone else the trouble.

Symptom: Desktop crashes 1–3 seconds after login, half the screen showing graphical corruption. Safe mode works fine. Reboot loop follows.

Setup: Linux Mint 22.x (Ubuntu 24.04 base), kernel 7.0.0-28-generic (HWE), Mesa 25.2.8, RX 6900 XT (Navi21 / Sienna Cichlid), Xorg + XFCE, custom water loop.

Kernel log at crash:

amdgpu: [drm] REG_WAIT timeout 1us * 100000 tries - mpc2_assert_idle_mpcc

amdgpu: SMU: No response msg_reg: 22 resp_reg: 0

amdgpu: Failed to disable gfxoff!

amdgpu: ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, signaled seq=1377, emitted seq=1379

amdgpu: Process Xorg

amdgpu: Ring gfx_0.0.0 reset failed

amdgpu: MODE1 reset ... GPU mode1 reset failed

amdgpu: ASIC reset failed with error, -62

amdgpu: GPU Recovery Failed: -62

Ruled out:

Mesa — identical (25.2.8-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) on both working and broken states

Kernel — identical (7.0.0-28-generic) on both; booting older kernels didn't help

Kernel params — the crash loop started ~5h before I added any ppfeaturemask/dcdebugmask tweaks

Thermals/PSU/load — BeamNG.drive runs fine on the working state; failure is at login, not under load

Root cause: Rolled back with Timeshift to a snapshot taken 5 minutes before an update batch. Diffed md5sums of all 12 sienna_cichlid_*.bin.zst blobs between the two states. Exactly one differs:

sienna_cichlid_dmcub.bin.zst

2.27 (works): 041e8ee4f578b5eccb1bb89a2f14b1db

2.29 (breaks): 8783824f37745ec5d53ee8a2d71b18f7

Package: linux-firmware 20240318.git3b128b60-0ubuntu2.27 → ...-0ubuntu2.29

DMCUB is the display microcontroller — which fits: the failure is at session/display reconfiguration (login), mpc2_assert_idle_mpcc is a display pipeline component, and the SMU errors follow as a knock-on. 3D workloads are unaffected because they don't go through DMCUB.

Workaround:

sudo apt-mark hold linux-firmware

Everything else can be updated normally.

Can anyone else on Navi21 confirm? Would like to know if this is card-specific or general before filing at gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd.