Brief report, will do a HCL if it stays reliable for a while
5650U Ryzen 5, 48gb memory
Required more tweaking than my previous Intel qubes computers
First install was very laggy and took 3 times longer than usual time (by the time I just aborted). A brief dd test in terminal showed transfer rate of nvme was a quarter of its usual rate
I disabled wifi and Bluetooth in bios and the install proceeded normal, slightly faster than other older computers
second stage of install went smoothly, no issues
However the performance started degrading and lagging as I used it until, after some updates to fedora and dom0, it refused to start any new qubes (gave the 60 second timeout error). This was after about an hour of usage. I looked at the log and it seemed to be memory balancing related
My CPU is Ryzen pro and has TSME on. I switched it off in the bios and all the issues went away
This laptop is excellent. I thought performance improvements had stopped progressing in the last 5 years of tech but clearly not. The first stage of install is about 10-20% faster and the second stage cut my previous time in half. Things like a fedora 42 update go a lot faster especially anything kernel related. And all the preloading and restarting of multiple service qubes just altogether happens a lot faster.
The only persistent issue is the fan control is way off. It turns on after a few minutes of use (unrelated to CPU temp) and then never turns off again. BIOS and EC updates made no difference. I ended up installing
thinkfan in dom0 and all good now.
Edit
Perhaps spoke too soon ![]()
Two issues
Sys-whonix stopped working. Progress on control panel stopped at 75% and logs had warnings about compression bomb. No internet. Didn’t see any options to reset. Wanted to revert sys-whonix to default state. Some recommended deleting cache file/folder but that seemed risky. Found this helpful post and ran the command to wipe private volume for sys-whonix. Started working again
On one power up, the CPU sensors failed, read as zero. Fan wasn’t coming on at all. Figured it was an issue with thinkfan but, after disabling thinkfan, fans never came on (reverting to default EC controller usually made them). Laptop got very hot. Even forcing a value to /proc/acpi/ibm/fan only got the fan working for a while before stopping again. Concerning, can’t leave laptop unattended lol