Soon It Might Be Possible To Finally Have A Nice ARM-Powered Linux Laptop

[e8hffff]

It would nice to see ARM based CPU's/SoCs driving graphics cards that are known to be x86 territory.

[arbition]

Low weight, moderate battery life, middling but not useless specs, not excessively expensive. The first three are well catered for, but the last condition has stopped my purchase of any new laptop in the past 3.5 years. I instead have something with moderate to high weight, moderate battery life, good specs and an already sunk cost. When I do need it, it performs very well, but it is not something I can carry with me all the time to just work something out right then and there.

Bring it on! (sorry not sorry for another me too post)

How good is the Freedreno driver? As good as Nouveau driver atleast? AMD open source drivers? Intel open source drivers?

If not, then it's not feasible to use Linux desktop on something with an Adreno GPU (or any of the other ARM GPUs like Mali, Vivante etc.)

[kpedersen]

My point still stands that Windows, in the form of RT, was available on ARM since 2012.

Windows NT was available on POWER and MIPS but that "failed". It is mostly about what Microsoft wants to support (or gets paid by Intel to support). I hate the fact that we are seemingly at the whims of those greedy twits at Redmond

[kpedersen]

I want to be excited, but all my build tools and IDEs will probably fail and I'll go back to using an x86-64 machine as my primary, and I don't really use computers for things other than development.

I would say, if there is any doubt... Replace your build tools with something portable. Gone are the days where a developer can just sit in Visual Studio 6 and never think about build system maintenance / lifespan / portability.

gcc/clang, Vim and CMake function the same on any modern development platform. I would suggest starting there

[Vistaus]

Windows RT is not a full Windows 10 coupled with an x86 emulator.

So? The argument given was "Windows was not available on ARM until now". And that I proved wrong because of Windows RT. Whether or not it was full-fledged Windows 10 is a whole other story. My point still stands that Windows, in the form of RT, was available on ARM since 2012.

[Vistaus]

The market is too small, that's why the vendors don't care.

One broadly applicable problem for hardware like this is a similar problem to what killed Valve's SteamOS Steam Machine products: if you know Linux well enough to be a potential market for the device, there's a spectacular chance you can more cheaply adapt other hardware. The launch Steam Machines were nice, but I could cobble together something performance equivalent for half the cost because of extra components I have. And this gadget will undoubtedly be nice too, but I can buy a used laptop with better specs on Ebay and install Linux myself.



And it died in the market due to poor sales because tens of thousands of existing Windows x86 applications were not available on it (and maybe also because the hardware was insufficient so the performance was poor, I don't remember). As -MacNuke- pointed out, the Qualcomm 845 has emulation for x86 applications and while it may lag a modern Intel mobile chip with a similar power draw it most likely blows the original Windows RT gadgets out of the water for performance.

(Edit: Though admittedly the Windows 8/8.1 debacle almost certainly contributed a lot to the failure of Windows RT. Maybe a user interface better than Windows 8/8.1 and better naming would have saved the product. Windows 8 is a giant pile of evidence that a corporation can waste money as efficiently as a member of Congress.)

It doesn't matter if Windows RT failed because that was not the point. The argument given was that Windows hadn't been available on ARM until now, but Windows RT, despite its failure, was ARM so technically Windows was available on ARM since 2012.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Last time I checked, ARM based Chromebooks do not qualify under Crostini. Only x86-64.

So while running Linux apps on ChromeOS may be a victory overall, those who bought into the ChromeOS on ARM platforms will be reaching the end of the road soon.

I got a notice that Google is starting the deprecation of several ARM Chromebooks. My Samsung Exynos based Chromebook is hitting EOL and I have no recourse. I will have to bin it.

Nope. ARM based Chromebooks are getting Crostini too.

The Samsung Chromebook Plus has support for KVM Host and the Linux VM in the Dev channel.

As far as Steam goes... I'm wondering if Eltechs can work on ARM based Linux laptops like it does with Raspberry Pi. Eltechs Exagear now has support for hardware accelerated graphics, thus possible to install Wine + Steam with 3D acceleration on at least the Raspberry Pi models. Only 32-bit apps and games are supported atm. It will be a fair bit slower than playing native on x86 but a Qualcomm 845 is gonna be pretty speedy, so the end result is older 32-bit Windows games might be somewhat playable on ARM via Wine.

[starshipeleven]

If Qualcomm makes a line of SoCs for laptops only hopefully they can support high RAM and So-DIMMs.

Afaik they don't, it's all used in ultraslim form factors where they don't have the physical space for DIMM slots and M.2.

[pal666]

You're right about Steam though.

it is easy to live without steam. much harder without steam library