It's Becoming Possible To Run Linux Distributions On The HP/ASUS/Lenovo ARM Laptops

[GruenSein]

That's a chicken and egg situation: the devices won't exist without knowing the market, but the market has no devices to choose from. I'm sure ARM would be much more popular among Linux users if there was a decent device for a decent price with decent drivers that work on a modern kernel. Nvidia makes good stuff but it's so expensive. RPi mostly has everything we need except the hardware is crappy for anything beyond fixed-purpose functionality. The Odriods are pretty good but the GPU drivers usually aren't.

I will gladly buy from Linux vendors and even pay the higher premium if they manage to sell a competent ARM laptop.

The decent price is the sticking point from my point of view. That is particularly true for System76 etc. since their benefits over buying a Dell laptop and simply installing Linux on it are marginal at best. Often, they are trailing behind when it comes to current generation hardware. And the industrial design is.. well.. a matter of taste but not on par with other hardware manufacturers. That being said, if AMD keeps working on their linux support the way they have been for the last couple of years, the best choice might be to skip the still experimental ARM stuff and simply buy a Lenovo (or other standard) laptop with an AMD APU.

[hsivonen]

How's the scheduler and thermal throttling? If you run a single-threaded compute-only benchmark multiple times, do you get consistent results across runs? In other words, is the setup suitable for benchmark-driven development of aarch64 code?

[aht0]

You'd trust Qualcomm-based laptop. I mean Quadrooter bug..
IMHO about on par with Intel's issues..

[edwaleni]

What would be even more interesting is if Wine could tap into the Snap850 x86 translation accelerator (or brake depending on how you view it). Apps won't blaze by any means, but you still get some functionality parity.

My last go round with AArch64 was most of the apps I wanted to use had no ARM counterpart.

I have looked at the Linux on cheap new intel laptops (ie: Lenovo Ideapads as an example) for awhile and have found that anything Pentium from Haswell up requires a lighter desktop version of the Linux release. Installing stock Ubuntu was just too heavy for those castrated cores and graphics.

I am guessing that any Linux ARM install will reveal something similar.

[chithanh]

I can't believe that it took Microsoft to kickstart this. Somebody please explain me why this has not become a thing 5 or even more years ago. We could have gotten Linux ARM laptop 5 years ago easily because Linux distros aren't so architecture dependent as Windows is, as long as you don't use prorietary software.

It didn't. Chromebooks were on ARM years ago, and you could run other Linux distros on them fine.
Also the Pinebook is available and working well. They are even launching an upgraded model (Pinebook Pro) this year.

[George99]

Just 4 or 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage for 650-830 $$$? Sounds somewhat expensive to me just for playing with ARM.

[starshipeleven]

Another thing I'm woried about is that the Infrastructure around ARM isn't as flexible as x86. Like, as far as I know I can't just pop a CD into an ARM laptop and boot from it and install the system like that. :'( Maybe that's why ARM hasn't catched on..

Many designed consumer ARM systems have some form of bootloader that always tries to boot from SDcard first so you can use the SD as a CD of sorts.

All ANdroid devices can be put into "fastboot" mode where the bootloader awaits your system image from the USB port and this is pretty standardized.

I don't know about these ARM UEFI ones.

[torsionbar28]

Nvidia makes good stuff but it's so expensive.

I beg to differ. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from NVidia's failed lead-free solder balls fiasco. I know four people who all got screwed by the failing NVidia laptop GPU's. NVidia stalled and denied for so long, most folks ended up scrapping their new $$$$ laptops before vendors slowly began rolling out recalls. And even when you sent in your dead NVidia laptop for a recall replacement, they simply replaced the board with another identical one that was certain to fail again. Ugh, it pisses me off just thinking about it. I'm never buying NVidia ever again.

[starshipeleven]

You'd trust Qualcomm-based laptop. I mean Quadrooter bug..
IMHO about on par with Intel's issues..

I'd also like to add here that Qualcomm SoCs with a Modem (like these laptops) the modem is run at higher privilege than the main CPU, and it has DMA, and it is horrendously complex and large thing that can do a lot of stuff like actually initializing the SoC or enforcing firmware signatures on boot.

Basically, the modem on Qualcomm hardware is roughly equivalent to the Intel ME.

[Vistaus]

There has to be demand for it to happen. And if we buy Windows laptops and install Linux, then the producers of laptops have no idea the market exists. So... Please by your next Linux laptop from System76/Purism/Entroware etc.

I will, as soon as they offer me a Lenovo ThinkPad-like keyboard (I had a System76 Lemur, but it was nowhere near a ThinkPad) and for a System76-like price (so no Purism for me, I can't afford that, even if they'd offer me said keyboard experience). And by "Lenovo ThinkPad-like keyboard" that I mean the keys and the typing experience the keys offer, not so much the Trackpoint.