The Lenovo Legion 7 is a laptop specifically designed for the gaming market. It packs a beefy AMD Ryzen 7 processor with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX card and up to 32Gb of DDR4 RAM. It combines a decent alu housing with shiny RGB LEDs which puts this laptop somewhere in between a more flashier categorie of gaming laptops such as those of Alienware/MSI, and more subtle designed ones such as the Lenovo Ideapad. The RGB LEDs are user controllable, Lenovo decided to make some cool animations with them by default which will certainly draw the attention of everyone who’s with you in the room. Those such as I who want a more subtle appearance may choose to turn of the RGB’s. With that, but also because of the larger venting grills, this portable suddenly becomes much more of high-end workstation.

The specific model I’ve over here is the Lenovo Legion 7 16ACHg6. It has following specs:

• AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8 C, 16T, baseclock 3,2GHz, turbo 4,4GHz)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
• 32Gb DDR4 RAM
• 1TB SSD (M.2)
• 16″ 2560×1600 16:10 IPS LCD panel

With a target price of around € 1800 that’s a lot of computing power for less than 2k Euro and also less than many other so called workstations. By default it is also equipped with Windows 10 Home which is probable the best option for those considering using it as a gaming machine. My goals however is to use it for compiling various C/C++ projects, linux kernels, embedded system images and so forth. While Windows can also do that job, I’ve become more a linux fanatic over the years so I decided to give Ubuntu a spin for it.

This device was officially announced only few weeks back (March 2021) and is so to speak still arriving at the stores near you. Available may be troublesome so when I saw one available I decided to get one without hesitating.

Onto Ubuntu. I mostly favor the LTS releases because of their stability. However with hardware this shiny and new my hopes wheren’t high that everything would be working out well so opted to go for the recently release Ubuntu 21.04. For what I can so far tell the OS runs very smooth. However I did found some glitches that’re probable related to the recently introduced Wayland compositor. I’m using NVIDIA’s proprietary graphics drivers and animations run butter smooth, but off course due to the NVIDIA RTX gpu that was to be expected. WIFI, keyboard, USB, touchpad,camera is working out-of-the-box. At this stage I’ve bumped into 2 major problems. One is that the display brightness cannot be controlled. It’s fixed at 100% which is far from ideal in late evening hacking sessions. As it appears from a topic on askubuntu is seems to be related to a BIOS issue. The linux ACPI driver is not able to find the [\_SB.PCI0.GP17.VGA.LCD._BCM.AFN7] symbol, for some reason the BIOS is not defining that hence linux is not able to use it resulting in the backlight not being able to control.

Also audio playback is not working well. At least not when the speakers are the output device. When you plugin your earbuds or use Bluetooth everything plays well. Lenovo is using the Realtek ALC3306 audio codec. The kernel enablement can be found in /sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c. There are topics on github and bugzilla.kernel.org that cover this issue on similar laptops. According to Jaroslav Kysela Lenovo is using amplifier chips for the integrated speakers on recent hardware which must be initialized too. Much of that is undocumented.

My conclusion: the Legion 7 is very decent machine with great value for buck. It is advised to keep the OS to Win10. Linux fanatics better stay away from this machine: on linux we notice mayor problems such as backlight control and audio-out through its speaker tat are not being addressed.