Hello,
I am currently using a Dell XPS 13 9360, which is from 2017. It’s been serving me very well, but there’s one major annoyance I’ve been having: watching web videos and in particular Youtube on this thing has been a terrible nightmare. I use Firefox on Wayland on Manjaro Linux. Videos do not run smoothly no matter what I do. I get frequent stutters, freezes, and frame timing problems, and it gets worse the higher the bitrate and resolution. The CPU gets hot and the fans start running high and the battery drains quickly.. all just for watching Youtube. However, videos played back with MPV or VLC are fine… and I don’t get this issue on my desktop which has an Nvidia card, so I can’t really tell what’s going on.
When I had Windows on this laptop, I had the same problem on Firefox, but not on Microsoft Edge. So that means that the laptop can definitely handle these videos, but perhaps the issue is in software. Is it a Linux issue? Driver issue? Firefox issue? Wayland issue? Fractional scaling issue? or a hardware+software issue? who knows!
Anyways, I’ve given up trying to solve the problem and just lived with it, not asking for support here. But I want to make sure that my next laptop does not have this problem. The laptop has become a bit old now, and I am eyeing the Framework laptop (with AMD) as a replacement once my current laptop’s battery has worn out. Have people using Linux on the Framework faced similar issues? How about heat and battery life? I’d like to keep using Manjaro, so I’m interesting in particular on what Manjaro/Arch users have experienced. Also if you have fractional scaling enabled, how well it can handle it.