The short story is that Linux Mint 21.1 (based on Ubuntu 22.04) runs remarkably well on a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 AMD.
Thermals and Kernels
Reportedly, AMD added power management for the Ryzen “Rembrandt” mobile processors in the ACPI Platform Profile for recent Linux kernels. I couldn’t determine for sure what “recent” means, so I installed the package linux-oem-22.04c which installed the most recent 6.1 kernel.
ACPI Platform Profile also requires the package “power-profiles-daemon.” Other than that, I did not install TLP, thermald, or any other power manager.
At idle and with the screen brightness turned down a bit, the laptop consumes about 2.5 watts. The powertop utility estimates a battery run time of nearly 16 hours:
After installing the jackd audio daemon, conky, and a few other things that operate in the background, the idle power consumption rose to about 3.8 watts, with an estimated battery time of 10.5 hours:
While watching a full-screen 1080p YouTube video in a Firefox browser over WiFi, the power consumption averaged 7 watts with a battery time of 5.5 hours:
What Works and What Doesn’t
Except for the fingerprint reader, every other component of the laptop seems to work fine.
The special function keys at the top of the keyboard work, including screen brightness. The keyboard backlight works with Fn+SPACE. Trackpad and Trackpoint work. Sound works, both speakers and headphone jack.
Suspend and resume work.
Audio
I enjoy producing music on the laptop, so I installed Ubuntu Studio Controls, which manages the jackd daemon and pulseaudio bridges.
Ardour, Carla, and the excellent Surge XT synth all work fine.
Virtualbox
Virtualbox did not install at first because it has an undeclared dependency on gcc-12. After installing gcc-12, virtualbox installed
without problems.
Conky
You can download my .conkyrc config file here.
Comments
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