Back in August 2024, when we really needed a new laptop for university, I ended up buying an HP ProBook 445 G10 with Ryzen 7 7730U processor, 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD new for around €1000 at the time without any sales being on at the time. Though now that I’m looking into the laptop space again and binging through Josh’s channel, I am starting to feel like I might’ve gotten a terrible deal for my money.
The Vega 8 iGPU that I thought was a decent option ended up being not as great as I thought it would, and though I can run some indie games on the side and maybe even some older AAA titles, the visual quality is less than ideal.
I’ve bought this laptop because I’ve heard that HP had good Linux support, though it seems that I’ve only encountered issues on my hardware, ended up swapping back to Windows… and even there it’s performance doesn’t seem to be too great
Did I just waste a whole lot of money back then, buying an AMD laptop hoping for a good Linux support, when I’ve ended up only with a whole bunch of problems on my hand? Do you think there were better options out there, or am I just falling a victim to the confirmation bias since laptops are becoming so much better these days than they were a few years ago?
To be fair, I’m in Ukraine, so our prices are a bit inflated here due to taxes, so I’d probably be more looking at 800 or something in terms of the price range that it’d be elsewhere in Europe- but still, I feel like I’ve got a terrible deal for my money- and now I don’t know what to do with all of it
Sorry to hear about that. 7730U is a zen 3 architecture which during 2024 is an architecture that was almost 4 years old (even though 7730U might tell you its a chip from 2023). AMD has been making their lineup very confusing and misleading for several years now.
In terms of Linux support, you will almost always have some issues (some minor, some major) regardless of brand with the exception of Framework laptops.
There are also manufacturers like System76, Tuxedo and Slimbook, which should probably also work well on Linux I’d imagine, I think that’s one of their selling points
Speaking of, I think it’d be fun to see Josh and the team review one of those for a change
Sorry but yeah that was a pretty bad deal even back in Aug 2024. But hey its your laptop now. You cant turn back the clock, so just try to enjoy it as much as you can. It should handle normal web and office work really well. Some light indie and esport gaming. And then for AAA stuff you can try cloud gaming. Its not ideal but the latency is less of an issue for single player story games.
