What does HackerNews think of rtw89?

The Perfect Laptop | Jul 2023

I have the older version with the 6900HS but it’s more or less the same. I’ve run pop_os as well as fedora on it. Everything works great but you’ll have to compile the wifi driver https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89.

5.16 Kernel Development Statistics | Jan 2022

This is fascinating but how accurate is this? Because Ping-Ke Shih is credited with the lines related to the rtw89 driver, but looking at their github repo[1] I see no such name in the contributors.

Did Ping-Ke just merge the driver and get credited for it? Or are they behind the lwfinger account?

Hard to tell but I'd like to buy them a beer or two for that driver, my laptop thanks them.

Also interesting to see a fellow Swede Johan Almbladh in the top 5. Apparently this guy is the founder of AnyFi that are trying to deploy Wifi towers in Indonesia. Looking at some of his commits he also works with the Loongson CPU architecture that came out of China many years ago. For a while Richard Stallman was using a laptop with one of those CPUs.

1. https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89

I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012 | Jan 2022

Those 10 year old Thinkpads are still surprisingly capable. I still didn't completely stop using my X220 (also with some HW upgrades like 16GB RAM and ac Wifi) although I bought a Thinkpad P14s Gen 2 (AMD) this year.

Some remarks for running Linux on the P14s:

> On AMD models, performance was less than stellar for my workloads and not a significant jump over a laptop from 2018.

Might be that you need to bump up some power management settings to get full performance via e.g. [1] or [2]. There is also /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile but this is broken currently for T14/P14s Gen2 AMD and maybe other models [3].

> Wi-Fi/Bluetooth would not work on one of the laptops, even when I was using an up-to-date Linux distro. Likely related to the type of adapter used (not Intel).

Lenovo switched to using a Realtek adapter for some models (due to chip shortage according to their Linux support team). Linux 5.16 includes the driver now, there is also a backport [2] for older kernel versions available.

[1] https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj [2] https://github.com/xsmile/ryzen-ppd [3] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215177 [4] https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89

NixOS on Framework Laptop | Oct 2021

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Ach, the usual stuff about NICs being re-re-re-created, incredibly annoying.

I thought the same - then I bought in September 2021 a "Lenovo Ideapad 5 Pro 16ACH6" which is when I found out that the "Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8852"/"Realtek RTL8111E Ethernet LOM"/"Lenovo Device 4852" needs a brand new driver/module, respectively is not compatible with anything else.

I lost a lot of hair until I found "https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89.git" (thaaanks a lot!!!) which made it work (reliable in my case, even with notebook "suspend-to-RAM").

As of kernel 5.14.5 (on Gentoo) embedded support for that NIC is not available, nor I think in 5.14.12 (not 100% sure - I did not install it, just peeked into it) :(((

New Laptop: Thinkpad P14s | Aug 2021

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Got my device. It's super. A warning if any Linux user considers this though: Lenovo specs said Intel WiFi, but it came with Realtek 8852AE, and drivers for this aren't included yet in current kernels. It was straightforward to get it working with https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89 (latest KDE Neon), but for the time being that will then have to be done after all kernel udpates.

New Laptop: Thinkpad P14s | Aug 2021

I have the same laptop with the 4K IPS display and the AMD 5850U, and I am pretty happy with it. On Ubuntu I had to install the Wi-Fi driver manually [0], tweak the grub config to make the screen brightness control work [1], and install gnome-screensaver to make suspend/resume work properly. Maybe things would work better out of the box on Pop!_OS? Otherwise, it's pretty good. It does not heat up much compared to the previous Intel laptop I had, and it is plenty fast. I was not able to make Howdy [2] work properly, and the fingerprint reader was not reliable compared to my MacBook, however.

[0]: https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89

[1]: Add this to the grub file : GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="amdgpu.backlight=0"

[2]: https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy