I’ve been using this laptop for about 5 months now.

It’s an awesome bit of kit but it’s not a desktop. I’ve had some pretty disappointing performance from it and it doesn’t matter if it’s Linux or Windows.

The offset keyboard with the trackpad makes me hate using it to code on. Having it on my desk doesn’t make sense when I have a better desktop. I hacked around everything to try and improve things, but it really just wasn’t it.

I’ve stopped playing competitive titles and have been playing titles that compliment a lower refresh rate. It has been decent enough for this.

Ideally I do want to move over into a HX desktop but with my Macbook I dont see the point.

So iffy on this whole thing. But I was happy when I boguht it because my old laptop had shit the bed.

So you might have seen recently that a new generation of Legion Pro is on the horizon. We can tell because the Legion Pro 5 has been heavily discounted in retailers because god forbid they shipped the Ultra series models.

I have been looking for a laptop for over two years now. It has been a difficult search because I’ve wanted to consolidate a few devices into one, but have struggled to find a good solution on the market.

Hopefully this post is of some interest. Mostly it’s just cathartic for me. You can skip past the rationale for the setup.

The Perfect setup

The perfect setup would be:

1. AMD Halo Strix
2. Surface Pro form factor and keyboard
   • Not 13” though. Too large. More like 10-11”.
3. Power management like the Legion Go

Ultimately the OXP X1 was the best contender however the 8840U + 64GB was never available when I had the funds to make the purchase. The HX370 wasn’t available when I was looking to buy, but the 8840 would have done a great job anyway.

I did run into concerns with both eDP and Occulink though. By all YouTube tests published, there was a noticeable drop in performance due to bandwidth limitations, and it made the technology redundant for gaming on a 4K screen or 21:9 ultrawide.

The perfect setup would probably be the OXP X1 form factor. The 3-in-1 tablet with detachable controller (not that they’re needed), with the detacahable keyboard. The only enhancement that the OXP needs is to build the kickstand into the device.

If the OXP X1 was available with the HX370, then I would have just purchased that.

Balancing Laptop Requirements

I really needed to step back and define why I was wanting to purchase yet another device.

I ultimately wanted to consolidate all of the devices on my desk into a single dockable solution. I currently have the following items on my desk:

1. Desktop
2. Laptop
3. Legion Go
4. Phone
5. Tablet

Flying international for work was a pain point for me because the carry-on baggage was so heavy. I had to pack everything but the desktop and ultimately gave up on the tablet once I bought the Legion Go.

Migrating around the house while writing code was an additional painpoint because it meant that I had to keep my desktop and laptops project folders synced, and I couldn’t do that with WebDAV. SyncThing helped, but then dev environments outside of docker were also a complexity.

Any complexity is time to me, and I never feel like I have enough. So syncthing Neovim configs or any other kind of dotfile is just a neusence.

I ultimately wanted to consolidate all five devices into a single device. I wanted to:

1. Work on it like a laptop on the lounge
2. Play games on it like a handheld in bed
3. Use it on a plane like the Legion Go
4. Work on it or game on it with my monitor at my desk

Some compromises were to be expected, but ultimately I couldn’t find a device that married all of them together.

Gosh, I’m getting dejavu. I think I’ve posted this before.

Let’s just get to the laptop and skip the history.

Discovering Legion

Every time that I end up in places like JB Hifi or Officeworks, I like to peruse the laptop selections and have a laugh at what passes for a $3,000 laptop. More often than not, you’re paying over $2,000 for Intel N100 territory specs, and I can never pick who they’re designing these laptops for.

On a recent work trip to Sydney, I had to get some printing done at Officeworks and decided to peruse the laptops while I waited. Officeworks oddly often has a great selection of laptops, while JB Hifi hasn’t stocked a decent laptop in over five years, so it’s always a fun peruse.

I noticed the Legion Pro 5 on sale for $2200 down from ~$3k. I looked it up online and it was heavily discounted at Lenovo as well.

The thing that shocked me was the actual size of the 15.6” laptop; it was tiny. Not quite 14” tiny but noticeably smaller than my 16” MBP or the Asus G16. It’s a 16:10 display but theres something about the form factor that gives you the 16” laptop feel in a smaller footprint.

It’s a heavy, chonky boy but it’s not exactly a desktop like the MBP.

Somewhere between the 33.3% discount, the 4060m and the 14900HX, I decided that I needed to buy it. Only 32GB DDR5 RAM and 1TB NVME but I could upgrade that because it’s an older Intel Legion.

Honestly, I was just happy to drop my degrading Dell Latitude which had a failing keyboard, display, trackpad, speakers and USB prots and was struggling to charge (due to USB C negotiation though).

The 240hz screen was the biggest seller. The CPU and dGPU were enticing enough - and I had some high expectations sadly - but the trackpad ultimately sold the sale.

Nice Features

The Legion came with a 300w power brick however I was shocked when my 60w and 100w USB C chargers kept the battery charging during ‘office use’. As far as nice features go, not having to be restrained to the expensive 300w brick charger is a huge positive for mobility to me.

I already have charging stations around my house, so the Legion actually slotted into my existing charging scenarios without any modification.

The keyboard is also quite pleasent to type on. It’s not as good as a mechanical keyboard and not quite at the level of a Mac, but it’s quick to become comfortable and has so far been quite reliable. Actuation force is low but it has a noticeable tactile feedback, while audibly not ostentacious yet still providing ample feedback.

The trackpad is great. I hate cheap trackpads and they’re jumpy nature however I have been able to knock out some svg’s on the laptops trackpad while travelling and I haven’t felt a need for a mouse. To me, just as good as the MBP.

Speakers are also decent for what you get. One thing I wanted was some speakers at my desk and I liked having decent speakers in my MBP for YouTube and music while working.

Not Nice Features

The 4060m is hot garbage.

Terrible performance for gaming while driving the G9. I wasn’t expecting desktop 4060 performance but I was expecting stable 200FPS in Counter Strike on low graphics. I ended up getting unstable 60-250fps with massive stuttering on de_train.

The 14900HX is decent enough but it’s obviously not good enough for CS2.

All other titles have run above the 60FPS mark without having to resort to upscaling though. Skyrim, RDR2, Fallout, GTA, Cyberpunk and all of those GPU intensive titles have been relatively stable enough for enjoyable gameplay. It’s just competitive that seems to suffer, which might be more 14900HX related, or maybe it’s due to my expectations being set too high by AMD.

I’ve also run into huge issues with the GPU on Linux. I ended up dropping to Windows to see if I had the same issues and sadly they were all fixed. Happily though, a recent testing of Ubuntu seemed to fix my issues, so I’m ultra confused at the moment.

Essentially, the laptop runs fine until you plugin an external monitor. Prime offloading is great, rendering is smooth enough, the battery gets depleted the moment you boot a game; everything as it should be.

Then you plugin a monitor.

I accept that 5120x1440 at 240hz is a pipe dream over USB 3.1. I don’t accept that 5120x1440 runs at 120hz but the display doesn’t refresh at 120hz. I especially don’t accept that a 4060m GPU would struggle with the resolution in the slightest for office work.

I’m happy to accept that gaming on my G9 would suck because it sucks with every game. 21:9 is a terrible decision outside of niche scenarios and there’s a reason that the model died faster than it launched.

But I’m not happy to accept that the 4060m can’t achieve the performance of a 780m. That’s a fucking low blow by Nvidia, coupled with a suck salad of garbage support for Linux.

Fortunately for me though, Ubuntus drivers did not experience the same “60hz displayed at 120hz” issues for me. I had issues with Debian, Arch and Gentoo but Ubuntu actually worked. This actually allowed me to keep the laptop on Linux and allows me to continue to enjoy using it.

I just have to accept that gaming on this laptop (and monitor) is going to bottle neck on CS2.

Operation System

I had a strange issue with this laptop.

The biggest issue that I have had is my external monitor. Plugging in my Samsung Odyssey G9 would tank performance, fail to present the correct EDID data and when I can get the correct EDID data (or force a mode), it will report that it’s running at 120hz but it looks like it stutters down to 60hz to the eye.

I immediately threw Gentoo onto it because I was on a Gentoo kick but being the fifth install of the month, I couldn’t really find the motivation to run through it. I also didn’t want to resort to binhost but I also didn’t want to have to compile Chromium for 12 hours every release.

I ran through an Arch installation however I didn’t have great success with the Nvidia drivers. Everything that I tried to do caused issues and DE’s like Gnome and KDE were stuttering messes.

Of course battery life hasn’t been the greatest but I can live with that. The combination of power management and dGPU issues beat me down a bit, and on a curiosity kick I decided to install Windows again.

I never bothered running the factory Windows installation because I couldn’t be bothered figuring out how to avoid using an internet login.

Power management was reasonable but battery life was not improved. Performance wasn’t improved. GPU performance on my external monitor didn’t improve in FPS, but it looked (to the eye) to display correctly. Perceived performance was quite good, even if Windows struggled to pull correct EDID information and re-engage the external display coming out of sleep.

Going back to Windows wasn’t super jarring as it used to be. I hacked past the internet login and tried to disable as much of the bloat as possible. It was all reasonably usable and it seems Windows has realized that we don’t want features re-enabled every time we turn it off.

Generally speaking, development workflows and gaming workflows have been iterated on since I last used Windows. Everything felt to be a little bit better refined and they’ve baked in a lot of features into VS Code.

At the end of the day, I just wasn’t happy.

I went for a job with Canonical and figured that I’d try Ubuntu out. The graphics drivers work phenomenally so I stuck with Ubuntu for a couple of weeks. Then I rebooted one day and snap just corrupted itself, I lost my Firefox profile, had to reinstall all of my Snap apps, and it was such a nightmare.

Ubuntu seems to prefer snaps too. I noticed Snap trying to install Neovim (0.9.5) from Snap constantly when I was running 0.11.1 that I’d compiled from Git. It’s pretty aggressive with it, which I guess makes sense when you’re splitting your packages between apt and snap.

I was extremely happy in Ubuntu other than the snap oddities. Gnome and KDE both had fantastic defaults and i3 even had some luxuries preconfigured (like i3lock and sleep). The snap situation just burned me a bit, so I figured that I’d go back to Arch to see if I found any comfort.

Being back on Arch has been good so far. i3wm + picom for fun. It all just seems to work as I would expect and I could just port over some dotfiles from Neovim and such, and I don’t feel like I’ve left Ubuntu now.

Monitor oddly runs just as good as Ubuntu now so I don’t know what’s happened there.

It was a fun journey trialing out Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, Gentoo, Arch and Fedora and checking out the differences. Ultimately, there’s just no value in curated distros to me, so I think that I’ll just stick to Arch for a while. Maybe move to Gentoo later.

Ultimately

I’m getting over blogging these things a bit.

The laptop is working sufficiently well thanks to Canonicals work on Ubuntu, but I am disappointed that I couldn’t stick with Arch.

The the very least I can continue to work in a familiar environment and have temporarily solved my computing issues while moving between desk and lounge.

The next step I believe will be replacing this laptop with an OXP X1 HX370. I really want to drop Intel and Nvidia now, and I know that the HX370 is going to handle all of my scenarios on Linux far better because the Z1 was absolutely faultless (except for Lenovos insistence that 16GB RAM is sufficient for gaming).

I got over snap shitting itself so I went back to Arch. For some reason, it’s working flawlessly. It even works with my G9 connected via USB C, my 1440p gaming monitor via onboard HDMI and leaving the laptop screen on. No idea why it didn’t work ages ago.