New Laptop: Asus TUF Gaming A17 FA706IH-H7041TS
General
This is one of the first generations of laptop that comes with AMD’s new 7nm technology which I’ve been waiting for to replace my old broken ASUS work laptop.
Gaming laptops are in general excellent choices for work, they are beefy with big screens and good specs, exactly what you need for a work laptop, but without the hefty price tag that comes with typical work models. Especially if you upgrade.
Upgrading
Let’s begin with my mistake: I was under the assumption that all the A17 models were upgradable with one NVME M2 stick and one 2.5″ SSD in addition to the already present onboard main NVME.
This is not the case, the Asus TUF Gaming A17 FA706IU-H7171TS is possible to upgrade like that as it has a different motherboard layout than the FA706IH model.
The FA706IH can only get a new 2.5″ SSD. Anyway, here is a good video on how to upgrade the FA706IU model, everything which applies to the IH model as well.
Ubuntu / Linux
I started with trying to install Ubuntu 18.04 but after the installer finished the machine would not start, i.e. the boot sequence stalled at some point.
Then I tried Ubuntu 20.04 which would not even install, the installer hangs.
Finally I tried Ubuntu 20.10 which installed flawlessly and everything worked out of the box, even stuff like suspend, keyboard illumination and screen brightness controls.
From what I have been able to gather Ubuntu 20.10 is the first Ubuntu version which comes with kernel 5.8 and which is the crux here. Prior kernels will have issues either with the new AMD CPU or the combination of the new CPU and dedicated Nvidia graphics.
If you are able to start in low graphics or maintenance mode in a version of Ubuntu lower than 20.10 you could try to upgrade the kernel in order to get the machine working properly.
All in all I’m happy, I don’t really need to run 18.04 as the host system as I simply use LXC to run containers with 18.04 which in turn contain all the work related setups that need to be at a certain version to avoid nasty surprises.