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It was slow for me too, guys, but if you tweak the system, allocate virtual space for ram, etc., It is actually pretty decent...
My worries were ram and hd, I fixed those though, thankfully. My secret?: Tweek (not the powder or rocks, ie ur settings, fix them n00bz) Create virtual memory from the he, I allocated 16gb so for me I have 20gb of ram on this, 4gb + 16 virtual Get large memory card, I have 256gb and may upgrade, as needed ... |
Ok so I've had this laptop for a few days now and tested almost all the LInux Distros for those interested.
Here are the list of the best experiences right after install(all are 64bit): #1 Zorin Lite 15 #1 Xubuntu 18.04, only edit you will need is change touchpad behavior to disable trackpad while typing(enable and set it to 0.2 seconds, increase time if you need to). Other minor gripe is it doesn't come with htop, but it'll prompt you in terminal on how to install. Super fast start up(~5seconds to log in from cold) #1*Peppermint 10, this distro actually works the best right out of the box, all hotkeys work and everything. HOWEVER, this is a big however. I cannot get this distro to install, it errors out at configing since it doesn't have the controller for the eMMc drive. If you can get it to install I figure it'd be just as good if not better than Xubuntu #2 Manjaro 18.1.2XFCE, very good but has some screen flicker at max brightness and slower than Xubuntu. Also sometimes on start up it has graphical glitches. #3 Lubuntu 18.10. Everything good except one thing, which for me is a pretty big no, default driver for touchpad does not enable tap to click on touchpad, I didn't stay long enough to enable it. #4 Lubuntu Mate18.04.3 :good but slower than previous distros, also has more screen tear for me on youtube #5 Crunchbang++, keeps freezing and having issues #6 Debian cannot start Edit: I haven't tried installing to the eMMC, but the machine runs Debian stable reasonably well installed on a USB 3.0 dongle. I highly recommend the 5.2 backports kernel & the backports firmware-atheros package. Bluetooth is working. #7Bodhi LInux 5.0.0: freezing/slow/slow startup #8 PopOS: I tried a heavier OS for fun, this seems to work just fine, a little slower than the rest but as expected for a heavier specced OS I didn't try Linux mint or Ubuntu, those are heavier distros that I did not want to touch. They usually work with everything but not my purpose of using this laptop. Hope this helps you. |
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VERRRRY SUSPICIOUS. Virus.
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Black electrical tape.
Costa rica runs smoothly after a few seconds to get started, 70-95% cpu. Can't see gpu utilization but I know this hits 100% and glips badly without gpu acceleration on the 14w.
It takes around 6-10% of my 3700x desktop's cpu to run and 48% of the rx-550's gpu. The 3700x is about 12x faster than the a6 in passmarks so doing the math (even though its a totally BS metric, gimme some slack!
Seems all thats different is the underlying linux spin. But sounds like you have a handle on the hardware acceleration so its probably just some more tweaking. Mine is 100%.
Ram usage is good too. With the OS, chromium and 8 tabs, plus a bunch of extensions I have about half free ram. 45%-55% utilization.
So an OS with proper gpu acceleration that works not just with video playback, but available to the windows manager, can have a huge bottom line/response time improvement in everyday use.
This may be why things work better for some users than others. Clearly its not a platform that 8 year old kids and grandma's would turn their noses up at as has been claimed. I think windows would have used the gpu out of the box and surely would have with the proprietary radeon driver installed, but alternate OS's as we've found can be squishy.
Saw some fun stuff that chrome about 5 years ago when they were still actually trying to do HW accel in chrome and weren't just pretending they are. Chrome in many benchmarks around HW accel used the gpu just rendering windows, often INCREASING cpu usage when using gpu acceleration. But it was doing more, running the benchmarks faster in the process.
That's the ideal state for this...the gpu doing everything it can and the cpu playing clean-up.
Did you make a chromium build with the hw accel patch and the flag set? Or did you get mojovideodecoder working on something else?
Could also be the variance in performance/features between xubuntu and elementary?
...
I used the chromium dev build in your instruction with hwa patch and flag set to enable, that's why I see Mojo under media-internal.
I have a feeling xubuntu and elementary probably have some major performance variance in them in terms of codecs, driver addon/plugins. I tried mate before, yes xubuntu is light(too light?) but mate felt more smooth. The lack of smoothness could be seen as what ever action you were doing without lubricant that's xubuntu, dry and stiff.
I used the chromium dev build in your instruction with hwa patch and flag set to enable, that's why I see Mojo under media-internal.
I have a feeling xubuntu and elementary probably have some major performance variance in them in terms of codecs, driver addon/plugins. I tried mate before, yes xubuntu is light(too light?) but mate felt more smooth. The lack of smoothness could be seen as what ever action you were doing without lubricant that's xubuntu, dry and stiff.
Next project is to build chrome for windows with hardware accel turned on. If I can get that working, non windows OS's may not be needed.
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Next project is to build chrome for windows with hardware accel turned on. If I can get that working, non windows OS's may not be needed.
Ah! I have it. We want radeontop!
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y radeontop
sudo radeontop
(open chromium, run video and bring radeontop back to focus)
Mine is showing 83%-96% gpu utilization. So the chrome figure is cpu usage servicing the gpu acceleration, not gpu usage. Still a fun metric if we can keep acceleration but reduce the cpu usage to service it!
Ah! I have it. We want radeontop!
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y radeontop
sudo radeontop
(open chromium, run video and bring radeontop back to focus)
Mine is showing 83%-96% gpu utilization. So the chrome figure is cpu usage servicing the gpu acceleration, not gpu usage. Still a fun metric if we can keep acceleration but reduce the cpu usage to service it!
Ah! I have it. We want radeontop!
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y radeontop
sudo radeontop
(open chromium, run video and bring radeontop back to focus)
Mine is showing 83%-96% gpu utilization. So the chrome figure is cpu usage servicing the gpu acceleration, not gpu usage. Still a fun metric if we can keep acceleration but reduce the cpu usage to service it!
I did find something interesting, GPU in vp9 only uses 40%+.
Anyway we can increase vram? That 76Meg is so pathetic.
I did find something interesting, GPU in vp9 only uses 40%+.
Anyway we can increase vram? That 76Meg is so pathetic.
The driver decides the fixed and dynamic vram. The 76 meg is fixed, the gpu can access up to 2GB IIRC. Either 1 or 2. If we could add 4GB more, it'd default to at least 2. I don't think its adjustable, at least not easily. Mine seems to sip at the dynamic video ram even though half the ram is free.
Its funny because I've often bought machines with great gpu's and just acceptable cpu's and getting stuff to use the frickin' gpu has been a fight every time. My first was a dual core atom with the nvidia ION chipset. Cute little small quiet box with the ability to do many things like h264 in hardware. However it was 2 weeks of banging on it before I could get it to use the GPU to its fullest extent and I needed windows 10 and Edge to really work. Chrome would do h264 if you made it, but it wasn't obvious.
Since then I've been hesitant about machines like this, because I know making the software use the hardware can be a real chore. Microsoft does it with Edge, Apple does it with Safari, elementary did it with Epiphany, but googles pockets seem too small to make it work on anything other than sanctioned chromebooks and then only for 6.5 years...
Looks like someone should buy google a sandwich. They're looking a bit pekid.
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