I looked around for AMD laptops last year but that market was really quite cold, with a mere handful of models available (and most of them not in the right range spec & budget wise). I suppose it's got to be getting hotter thanks to Ryzen's success, but I don't know how long it takes..

AMD processors in laptops... If you insist upon one now, go with a Ryzen 3000 series, which is the same as the 2000 seris on desktops, so not terribly good but so so.

In my experience, there are no affordable laptops with good screens :-( They vary from bad to outright shit. My laptop has the 'fantastic' contrast rate of 410:1... I would not like to watch films with darker scenes on that. Glossy screens are also a horror; who the hell invented those.



Sorry my swearing but the screen is the part of the computer you look at the most so it should not be too bad if at all possible.

It seems hard to find a laptop that fulfils all needs.
Thinkpads initially seemed fine, but on a closer look it seems the design elements have become more generic. Also the base model displays seem to be really low quality. Also these appear to have an exorbitant price tag in my country. Also it seems only the intel variants are available till now.

Dell XPS series seems great, but they are intel only, and are way above my budget.

HP ENVY seems to have a model with AMD ryzen (though, previous gen), an X360 one.

I hope that there will be a bit more choice on ryzen laptops in coming months.

Don't hold your breath, that market moves surprisingly slow.

As I am hearing, since AMD made their display drivers open source, it is easier to run linux on a machine with an AMD GPU.

For Nvidia's drivers on some distros one needs to add extra repos to install drivers, I hear.

That is the case. There is also an open source driver (Nouveau) for Nvidia GPUs but it wasn't written by and isn't maintained by NVidia, and it lags hard behind the proprietary driver. AMD by contrast maintains the open source driver in the kernel and it's mostly feature complete. Intel also maintains open source drivers in the kernel.

NVidia is the black sheep.

I've always found it problematic to get Nvidia Optimus working properly with Linux on laptops/notebooks, though support has gotten a bit better in recent years.

My recommendation is to go with AMD (as you mentioned, their Linux driver support is a lot better, with their team directly contributing to the open source driver) or just with an integrated Intel GPU on a more powerful processor (like an i7) if you don't intend to do much gaming on it.

As to a recommendation, I would have normally gone with high-end Acer Aspire models, but I can't say I like what's come out in recent years. Maybe an ASUS VivoBook, though I'm not particularly pleased with some design choices they've made either. They do have Ryzen models though, so maybe it's something to consider at least.

Have a look for yourself: https://www.asus.com/us/Laptops/ASUS-VivoBook-15-F512DA/

For the way I see it you need to decide between:
- Proprietary NVidia drivers (that works great on many linux distro anyway).
- Create a desktop.

Laptop are intel-nvidia or at most intel-amd only. Two years ago MSI got some AMD laptop (only on the GPU side), right now I see only nvidia on the website.
Dell are only nvidia and intel.
Even apple mac (not a good way to go for you of course) only got old AMD GPU.
Etc...

Also you need to undestand that a gaming laptop will not last long on the battery side. 2-3 hours and you will not be able to game properly while you use the battery. On the other hand if you decide to go with an ultrabook you will not be able to use it for gaming for modern games like the witcher 3 (at least not with only 1.1k$ but maybe I'm wrong, after all I live in italy and the price here are much higher because of taxes).

If I were you I will just take a dell laptop. They are easy to open and upgrade, they got multiple pc for every needs (if you need a gaming pc you can take alienware, if you need a ultraportable pc you can go with XPS and if you need something in between they got that too (and are really good too)... just remember that a classic laptop and an alienware are more easy to upgrade than an XPS) a great compatibility with linux distro (you will still need to use nvidia proprietary drivers but you will be able to use open suse without a problem) and their built quality is great. Also you will be able to get 1-2-3-4 (if you take the XPS) -6-8-9 (if you do not take XPS) points of your lists.

The best compromise I think is the G series (not powerful like alienware, but with a better battery. Not with a great battery like XPS but easier to open and repair. Also cheaper than both and the old model can be with ubuntu instead of windows 10). Still intel and nvidia that's the only thing that it's not good for you.

If you just want an AMD PC just build a desktop pc, I see is no reason to get an obsolete laptop just to get a full AMD system.

3 of my last 5 machines were Dells. I only buy AMD graphics (and by coincidence, also only AMD CPU). My current is a Dell Inspiron 17" with Ryzen 2500U and Raven ("Vega Moble Gfx"). It came with a sucky 1TB drive and 12G RAM, which I doubled before I even powered the machine up (and converted the HDD to SSD while I was at it, and later added another TB as NVMe). I'm not sure if it's just my machine or all machines of this model, but the keyboard has issues so I find it hard to recommend this machine. I got around the biggest issue by physically unplugging the touchpad (not a big deal for desktop, since I always use a mouse, but on the bus it's hard -- I use my DualShock 4 as a touchpad now). My previous two died unexpectedly (one due to chronic water damage to the display finally killing it and one just decided to stop powering up). I used both of these deaths as excuses to upgrade my machine rather than fixing the old ones. Since my previous was basically the same model with older chipset, I might end up transferring keyboard and/or touchpad to my new machine to see if it works, but I think it's a BIOS/chipset irq routing initialization issue.

HP also makes a lot of AMD machines. My last HP Pavillion had a bug where amdgpu graphics weren't initialized properly in the kernel. After waiting a year for AMD to fix it, or at least acknowledge it, I chucked that machine and swore to never buy an HP again (it also had a broken keyboard, but i8042.dumbkbd=1 fixed it (and disabled the LEDs, but who cares?)). Look at the AMD site for a list of laptops; those are pretty much the only ones (and I wouldn't recommend a "gaming" machine, as they are usually just designed to be plugged in).

I also owned a Lenovo. Also never again.

Toshiba used to make a lot, but doesn't seem to any more (or I'm not looking at the right place). Back when I didn't care about 3D, Toshiba was my go-to brand. Once I did, I went cheap, though, and ended up getting Gateways and the machines I listed above. The only ones that felt like they had good battery life were the second Gateway I got (AMD A8 I think) and my current machine (maybe because of the SSD).

Oh, and relating my laptop with the OP: 1. Make sure OpenSuse has up-to-date drivers for RAVEN.

2. I use mine for all sorts of stuff. Lots of gaming. No photo/video editing.

3. I value resolution over other issues. I can't say how this one's display fares wrt your requirements.

4. This has a built-in 42Wh battery. I hate built-in batteries. This machine lasts pretty long on a battery, though. If you need more, you're SOL unless you can find a third party vendor with bigger compatible batteries. Also, I can't do my usual power-saving measure of suspend-to-disk (and never use suspend-to-RAM, so I can't say anything about it), but it's been 6 years since I had a machine where that worked, so I've learned to live with it.

5. One issue with both 17" Dell Latitudes I've owned (they're the same physical case) is that if you put it on a hard surface with one of its feet off the surface, the case can bend enough that the built-in DVD drive starts giving errors, which, even if you don't use the drive, can cause boot hangs & such. Doesn't happen as often with my new machine, mainly because I'm more careful about it. On my old machine, I just pulled the drive and left a gap. One of these days I'll buy a blu-ray replacement drive and see if that works.

6. No backlit keyboard. My last one may have had one; I don't like them myself so I don't remember.

7. Ryzen + Raven. You're getting an APU if you care about battery life at all.

8. Ethernet: yes. However, it's 10/100. Why they don't put gigabit ethernet on every machine made in the last decade I don't know. Probably saves them 5 cents in production costs. Also contains ath10k wifi and Qualcomm/Atheros bluetooth. All supported out of the box on Linux.

9. Opens easily enough with a small phillips and prying tool. HDD, NVMe/M2, 2 RAM DIMM slots, all easy to get to. The rest is harder.

See the link for approximately what I paid (I think I got it on sale for less). You'd probably be better off asking Dell directly and seeing how much you'd end up paying for tariffs & taxes.

Ok but I can only talk from my country. that laptop is not on the italian dell website.

PS. On the italian website there are a few inspirion with an AMD card (still intel cpu) that sucks.

Same with the US site. Apparently Dell disowns that machine (and all the other Dells I've bought, as well). You might be able to order it if you talk to Dell rather than shop on their site, though.

You do not mention which (screen) size you prefer and if your new laptop mostly will stay at home or if you will use it on travel. Reading your preferences for a long battery life and a bright display I assume you will travel with it at least sometimes. That most likely rules out a 17" device. When you go for a 15" or smaller device I would skip the optical drive, an external USB drive is the better choice. I also would skip the internal ethernet port and rather chose a laptop with more USB ports. You always can use an USB adapter for the ethernet. Both the external drive and the ethernet adapter can stay at home, so you have less weight to carry on travel. At least that would be my preferences.

Yes, looking for a machine with 15" or smaller screen.
External optical drives are fine for me. And ethernet adapters can be fine if the laptop has enough number of USB ports.
I will be travelling with the laptop occasionally, so a decent battery life is must. But as I can't stand poor screens and dimly lit screens are a pain to use in bright environments, a good screen is a must.

Can anyone tell me how hard it is to switch between onboard and discrete graphics card in linux nowadays?

This one laptop caught my eye:
ASUS TUF FX505DY
-15.6" display (freesync, IPS)
- Ryzen 5 - 3550H
- 8 GB RAM
- 1 TB HDD
- Radeon RX 560X 4GB graphics card

now the apparent cons are :
1. old gen graphics card (but this is not supposed be a gaming machine, primarilly)
2. Only HDD preinstalled . I will install an NVME SSD myself.
3. Modest amount of RAM. I will probably add another 8 GB. That should be enough for a Linux system.

The laptop will cost around 55K INR (approx. $800). SSD, RAM would cost extra.

What do you people think of it?
Does anyone know if there are any driver problems with this hardware?
Someone in reviews mentioned problems with ubuntu missing graphics drivers!