Armbian 23.08 Released With Work-In-Progress ThinkPad X13s Support, New SBCs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Armbian 23.08 Released With Work-In-Progress ThinkPad X13s Support, New SBCs

Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Armbian-23.08-Released

[enihcam]

I really wish if Archlinux could gain ThinkPad X13s support.

[andyprough]

These things are so expensive, and for a cell phone chip. I'm seeing prices for models with decent amount of ram for $2,100 to $2,300. And reviews indicate they are underpowered. I don't see what the use case is, other than to stretch your battery life from 10 hours to 15 hours.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Getting strange Freedreno behavior on both of Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS and ThinkPad X13s - on regular Debian 12 with steev kernel (with his laptop defconfig) and all necessary firmwares and user-space services, Gnome Shell Wayland session is very, very sluggish, especially in Firefox 102/115 (but also noticeable even in Nautilus and Settings). Somehow this issue is not reproducible with Armbian, but maybe because Gnome Shell is a bit newer.

Is anyone seeing same behavior on Debian 12?

These things are so expensive, and for a cell phone chip.

There is no smartphone SoC with four Cortex-X1 cores and four Cortex-A78 cores.

I'm seeing prices for models with decent amount of ram for $2,100 to $2,300.

Lenovo's MSRP prices is meaningless. Just wait for sale and you will be able to get one for 1300-1400 USD.

And reviews indicate they are underpowered.

You need to distinguish native benchmarks results and emulated benchmarks results in these reviews. For it's real price (1300-1400 USD) Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 native performance is fine in my opinion.

[andyprough]

There is no smartphone SoC with four Cortex-X1 cores and four Cortex-A78 cores.

Lenovo's MSRP prices is meaningless. Just wait for sale and you will be able to get one for 1300-1400 USD.

You need to distinguish native benchmarks results and emulated benchmarks results in these reviews. For it's real price (1300-1400 USD) Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 native performance is fine in my opinion.

Good enough, if you're happy with it then I guess it's fine.

[BillFleming]

Last I heard these Thinkpad X13s still had broken virtualization and possibly other things. Meanwhile qemu+kvm was working on my RK3588 board that also has 32GB of RAM.

[Ladis]

Last I heard these Thinkpad X13s still had broken virtualization and possibly other things. Meanwhile qemu+kvm was working on my RK3588 board that also has 32GB of RAM.

I also heard the virtualization is broken. Which makes these devices much worse than Apple, where virtualization works perfectly (e.g. playing older 3D AAA games in Windows in Parallels). What's M1/M2 missing is the nested virtualization, hope they will add it in M3.

[blackshard]

I also heard the virtualization is broken. Which makes these devices much worse than Apple, where virtualization works perfectly (e.g. playing older 3D AAA games in Windows in Parallels). What's M1/M2 missing is the nested virtualization, hope they will add it in M3.

Playing old x86 games on recent ARM hardware is not virtualization, it is emulation.

[Ladis]

Playing old x86 games on recent ARM hardware is not virtualization, it is emulation.

Windows runs fast in the virtualization, x86 apps inside it runs in the emulation.

[bloominstrong]

I really wish if Archlinux could gain ThinkPad X13s support.

Arch Linux ARM is a thing and they have a generic ARM image which could be worth trying on the Thinkpad X13 no experience with either myself though.