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

[wizard69]

Nice. Expensive. Fewer packages available. Slightly longer battery life (maybe). Lots of driver questions.

Shut up and take my money.

Actually my hope is significant longer battery life and frankly i dont care who builds it. One of the big problems i have with AMD or Intel based laptops is the terrible battery life. This especially if you try to do something demanding on these machines. I can remember watching a laptop loose 1% of the battery about every minute due to a compile running in back ground while watching a video in the fore ground. That really sucked.

One thing that id like to see come is an ARM based laptop with built in solar power collection. Granted we arent to the point that we can run a machine off solar cellls yet but the supplemental power could certainly extend a batteries run time. Even a 100 milli amps would help out.

[-MacNuke-]

Oh, so Microsoft released Windows RT in 2012 with faux-ARM support?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT

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

[wizard69]

I'm not interested in who is convinced that it will work and what they told each other in their conferences. They made netbooks too (which "sold" because they were cheap but sucked balls on any metric and got a ton of flak and were eventually discontinued over that).

Net boooks where just a bad idea. If we get a proper screen, keyboard and I/O the devices will lsell.

The issue is and has always been applications (and the Windows store). If enough third party software developers actually care about providing software for ARM then it's going to fly, if not it's going to fail the same as Windows RT (and phone) did.

Windows Store sucks for even i86 Windows. That will not be a success factor.

And no OEM nor Microsoft have power over zillions of application developers. If Microsoft started pushing UWP applications seriously (aka MS-style, aka coercing) and the store took off somewhat I could see that, but I don't.

I dont see MS as having the developer influence and guidance that you see with for example Apple and their developers. Maybe it is personal bias but to mee anyway it looks like Apple developers really get on board.

the point here is that the MS developrr world isnt going to be a huge driver for ARM based laptops. The driver will be China in my opinion. Maybe Apple to some extent if the rumors about ARM based laptops become true there. Interestingly FOSS support on Apple current laptops is pretty good in that the have more than one well supported repository for FOSS. Just compare homebrew to anything similar on Windows.

In any event if an ARM based laptop can launch with a basic Workstation distro support success is certain.

[andreano]

My RPi 1B based laptop burned up on my commuter train in 2012 when I connected the LiPo battery the wrong way. True story.

If no soldering is required this time, then please take my money.

[Vistaus]

That's not true. Just because I use a FOSS OS doesn't mean every app is open source. I use Chrome. I don't think that's available on ARM. You'd have to compile Chromium. I also use enpass, Steam etc.. They're not on ARM

Buf if your goal is to run Linux apps inside ChromeOS, as most people will do with this thing, then you're already running Chrome for ARM as it's the main browser on ChromeOS. And ChromeOS also has Android support, so you could run the Android version of Enpass. You're right about Steam though.

[zoomblab]

Does the different ARM motherboards still require custom linix distributions? This is what has put me off in the past. Each motherboard vendor gives you a specific version of lets say debian or ubuntu and that is it. There is not an generic ubuntu that works across all ARM boards and that is updated through the regular official process.

[Vistaus]

Windows had no ARM support, that is why.

Oh, so Microsoft released Windows RT in 2012 with faux-ARM support?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT

[RussianNeuroMancer]

If this work out with Qualcomm's 1000x chips - I am in. Not right now, as I just got Dell 7285 LTE model with 16 GB RAM four months ago, but in a few years I could replace it with something that deliver longer battery life, like HP Envy x2.

[edwaleni]

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.

[andyprough]

Nice. Expensive. Fewer packages available. Slightly longer battery life (maybe). Lots of driver questions.

Shut up and take my money.