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Testing Design Suite on Asus X550ZE

I recently bought an ASUS X550ZE to replace the venerable Sony VAIO N250E laptop. The reason of choosing an AMD powered laptop is for long term support i.e. the use of Vulkan API in future AMD GPU driver. In summary, here is the ASUS X550ZE specification taken from ASUS website:
  • Processor
    AMD® APU A10-7400P /A8-7200P/FX-7600P Processor
  • Chipset
    AMD A76M FCH
  • Memory
    DDR3L 1600 MHz SDRAM, 8 GB
  • Display
    15.6" 16:9 /Full HD (1920x1080)
  • Graphic
    AMD Radeon® R5 M230 + Radeon® R7 M265 DX Dual Graphics with 2GB DDR3 VRAM Built-in A10-7400P
  • Storage
    2.5" 9.5mm SATA
    1TB 5400/7200 RPM
  • Optical Drive
    Super-Multi DVD
  • Card Reader
    2 -in-1 card reader ( SD/ SDHC/ MMC)
  • Camera
    VGA Web Camera
  • Networking
    Integrated 802.11 b/g/n
    Built-in Bluetooth™ V4.0 (Optional)
    10/100/1000/Gigabits Base T
  • Interface
    1 x COMBO audio jack
    1 x VGA port/Mini D-sub 15-pin for external monitor
    2 x USB 3.0 port(s)
    1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert
    1 x HDMI

  • Audio
    Built-in Speakers And Microphone
    SonicMaster
  • Battery
    4Cells 44 Whrs
  • Power Adapter
    Output :
    19 V DC, 4.74 A, 90 W
    Input :
    100 -240 V AC, 50/60 Hz universal
Booting Fedora Design Suite 22 Beta TC5 went well except a bug on Radeon driver prompting to set "nomodeset" on boot configuration. Once at the desktop session, ithe following issues are:
  • Fn buttons from backlight to volume not functional
  • Touchpad not functional. Not sure if it is related on the xorg-x11-drv-libinput or xorg-x11-drv-synaptics and possible the laptop is new.
  • High power consumption. With only the generic graphical driver (llvmpipe), the battery longevity is only two hours without proper power management
  • Because of use of generic graphical driver , neither Cheese nor Video works without crashing. Attempting to use Wayland will cause fallback to login screen.

On the positive side:
  • Bluetooth is functional
  • Display is set at high setting i.e. Full HD (1920x1080)
  • Applications like Gimp, Inkscape takes advantage of the quad-core feature.
Despite the shortcoming due to driver issues, the laptop is still useful for work usage. Perhaps a kernel update will address the problem.

Update:
After removing "nomodeset" from boot parameter, the login screen displayed under Wayland. The default Gnome session crashed but the Gnome on Wayland runs smoothly aside some known issues.
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