Issues with Ubuntu 20.04 on AMD Ryzen 7 4800H and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

UPDATE: Ubuntu 20.10 fixes the issues listed below.

ASUS came out recently with very powerful gaming laptops at a very good price. The hardware is quite recent. Installing Linux on these laptops is quite frustrating. The majority of the distributions have major issues.

My biggest issue with Ubuntu 20.04 relates to the brightness control of the screen. Out of the box, there is no way to control the screen brightness and by default, it is set quite high. After trying numerous solutions found in forums, none fully worked. Some even forced me to re-install Ubuntu.

I was able to make it work partially but enough to set the brightness at an acceptable level. Nevertheless, I still have to cope with the following issues:

1. The user interface brightness controls still don't work
2. The keyboard brightness control still doesn't work
3. This hasn't been tested using an external monitor
4. I had to fall back to the AMD Graphic Chip Set.

To apply this partial solution, you will need to upgrade Ubuntu's kernel to version 5.6 and select the AMD GPU. You will need to open a terminal window to run this procedure.

WARNING: You perform this procedure at your own risk. It worked for me but I cannot guarantee that it will for you.

sudo apt-get install linux-image-5.6.0-1007-oem linux-headers-5.6.0-1007-oem linux-modules-nvidia-440-5.6.0-1007-oem mkdir /tmp/amdgpu mkdir /tmp/amdgpu cd /tmp/amdgpu git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git cd linux-firmware/amdgpu/ sudo cp * /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ sudo update-grub2 sudo reboot

After rebooting, you will be able to set the screen brightness using the following command. The example below sets the brightness to 40% (0.4). I have added this command at the end of my user's .bashrc. Sometimes, the high brightness comes back, this command must then re-executed. It doesn't happen often.

xrandr --output eDP --brightness 0.4

I will update this post if I find any new improvement. This resolved an issue that was a show stopper for me and working only with Windows wasn't an option.