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

[Dark-Show]

Honestly, for myself the feature selling it to me is Linux + Long battery life. If I need or want to mess with windows games, I'll find a x86 emu with opengl pass-through + wine.

[Gibb]

Sigh... it's 2018 people... stop waiting for Microsoft. Heck, I'll do it myself if nobody is going to do it.

[speculatrix]

there's already a project for an open platform linux laptop

https://mntmn.com/reform/

and of course you have the Pinebook,

https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707

Pi-Top

https://pi-top.com/

and the Pipo P10 with an RK3399

https://www.pipo-store.com/pipo-p10.html

[coder111]

Why? Microsoft. Some early Netbooks had ARM CPUs and were running Linux. Microsoft killed those off by threatening OEMs since Microsoft didn't have an ARM OS at the time that could compete. This was 2007-2009- pre-Chromebook era. It not for Microsoft's bullying anticompetitive tactics, world would be different.

Thank god for this. Finally ARM laptops will be modern!

Why has it taken so long?

[TheCycoONE]

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.

The Samsung Chromebook Plus is reported to have Crostini, and that's ARM. (https://chromeunboxed.com/news/samsu...ps-dev-channel)

I have one but I've been running ArchLinux ARM as the primary OS, so I haven't checked.

[pirx]

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.

You know you can put any arm distro on any arm chromebook, right?
Just don't throw it away.

[e8hffff]

ARM laptops. Just in time for everyone to start wishing for RISC-V laptops! ;-)

On open hardware too.

[chithanh]

With that logic Windows was a multi-architecture OS all along since Windows CE was available

Not at all. Windows CE is very different from Windows.

Windows RT however was a straight port of Windows 8 to ARM. It could even run Win32 (after compiling for ARM) and .NET applications. However a jailbreak was needed to run non-Microsoft signed programs. That Windows RT ultimately failed in the marketplace after a total of 7 devices (2 from Microsoft and 1 device each from ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, Nokia, and Samsung) is inconsequential to Vistaus's argument.

[-MacNuke-]

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.

With that logic Windows was a multi-architecture OS all along since Windows CE was available. But that does not mean that it was useful for notebooks. The original question was why nobody made such ARM notebooks before. The answer is that there was no Windows available apart from some mobile crap. And Windows RT was a failure before it even started.

[LaeMing]

ARM laptops. Just in time for everyone to start wishing for RISC-V laptops! ;-)