I bought a Lenovo laptop a couple months ago and tried to run Ubuntu, Mint, and even Opensuse on it, but none of them were all that compatible. Upgrading to Vivid Vervet helped a little, but not all that much. There were still bugs that made it hard to use. Bugs like the microphone being incredibly fuzzy and making it nearly impossible for me to be understood. This is also a pretty new computer model, too. So new hardware + AMD = unpleasant linux experience for me, unfortunately. Is there a different distro I can try out, or at least something to make it more AMD friendly?

NintenAkira,

Welcome to LQ.

It would be helpful if you could give us the Lenovo laptop's exact model details or a link giving the specifications.

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Agreed. Without more information to know what hardware you have apart from the AMD APU, hard to make a good recommendation.

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It is a Lenovo G50-45 80E3.

Lenovo G50-45 80E3.

I found a review that the user that has that laptop said Kali Linux works great on it. Kali is a debian based distro used for penetration testing, so in theory Debian should work well on it. Note this is from a review that I read, I have never used this laptop.

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Okay, thank you! How about Elementary OS? I've been looking into that one as well. Should I try that or just go for Debian?

NintenAkira,

The microphone, wireless adapter and Radeon drivers have caused problems here:

http://kagashe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/1...1-in-dual.html

http://kagashe.blogspot.in/2015/04/u...op-g50-45.html

The blogger appears to have solved two of his problems, but he does not mention a solution to the microphone problem.

You could always ask a question on his blog page.

MX-14 is based on Debian and has a good reputation for recognising hardware:

http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.co.uk...iew-truly.html

You could also try Manjaro which is based on Arch and is usually pretty up to date:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/manjarolinux/files/

I suspect that you will need to make one or two modifications on this Lenovo laptop regardless of which Linux distro you choose.

You may try Fedora. It usually bundles latest and stable packages.

This is just a post so I can actually post a link. Thanks LQ for wiping out everything I typed.

So after speaking in another forum I realized here that we have the exact same model. I'm running 15.04 with Mate and don't have any of the issues you've mentioned. My audio, while tinny, is discernible. It's not awesome by any stretch of the imagination but it's usable and could easily be enhanced with Audacity.

My wifi and video work fine. I've actually got no real complaints about this laptop. Aside from my BT mouse not being detected I've been pleasantly surprised with how everything (including the function keys) seem to work just fine.

Here's a sample of my audio.