[rhamzeh]

I'd be much more interested in the Linux situation on this laptop. Most of the UI applications I use casually or CLI apps are available on ARM (I have them running fine on a Pinephone, so the experience on a laptop will only be better).

But not sure how the dev workflow would be: Podman, IntelliJ, Sublime Text, etc.. And some casual stuff like Calibre, Thunderbird, Joplin.

Oh and how much would the battery life improvement be. I already get 4~5+ hours on my 5 year old Thinkpad, so an improvement to 6 hours is not really worth it.

How is the BIOS and openness on these systems? I always heard the arm laptops are way more locked down than the x86 ones.

[sspiff]

When I last checked, the mainline kernel support for the 8cx was EXTREMELY limited. Having messed around with lots of ARM based devices on Linux in the past, I would not bother with this one. Especially given that rather unimpressive battery life.

I'd love a modern ARM based Linux laptop, but I also know that unless it's got mainline kernel support or a dedicated Linux friendly vendor (like Pine) behind it, it's lifetime and updates are going to be extremely limited. And that doesn't even consider graphics API support, which will have an impact on rather basic things, such as YouTube video playback.

Honestly, the only viable ARM laptop with good battery life and modern day performance is an Apple MacBook Air or Pro, which has a very impressive community project behind it. But even that is still incomplete and might peter out if some key figures burn out or become uninterested or preoccupied with for-pay work or whatever.

[wyldfire]

> When I last checked, the mainline kernel support for the 8cx was EXTREMELY limited.

Is that the case? I would've thought the devices present in 8cx are similar to the other Snapdragon 8 series which would probably be well supported upstream? Or do they linger in a GKI tree before landing upstream?

Maybe the exclusivity between QCOM/MS is mutual and they'll be able to partner with vendors like Canonical in the future.

Personally - I would love an XPS13 ARM linux laptop, hopefully Dell decides to jump on the bandwagon. I have owned i5/i7 XPS13s for several years now and am looking forward to ARM if they can make one that performs well.

[nirui]

Same where wondering if it performs the same/better under Linux. I imagine the battery life could be better under Linux based on my experience with Windows 11 on my own laptop, I mean, the fans don't even spin up that often under Linux unlike the near constant fan chorus Windows gives me.

Also, a computer without a single fan so I can comfortably use it on my bed? With possibility to replace it's SSD? It sounded a lot like my next laptop.

[jklinger410]

> imagine the battery life could be better under Linux based on my experience with Windows 11 on my own laptop

God, I have experienced the exact opposite with Linux on laptops. Battery management is so bad I am considering moving to a Macbook.

[gyulai]

> performs the same/better under Linux

...yeah, I was wondering that too. This seems like a job for a Gentoo system, compiled from the ground up with "-march=native". Would love to know how that would turn out performance-wise, in comparison to Windows.

[mfashby]

I use a pinebook pro (same company as the pinephone). Sublime works a treat. So does thunderbird, calibre.

Intellij doesn't have aarch64 Linux distributions, you can kind of hack it together it's completely unsupported. Not sure about Joplin but I expect it would be ok (I think it's electron based? VS code works ok too).

Re locked-down: pbp can run many different Linux variants, and boots with tow-boot bootloader. Hopefully that would support ThinkPad to, but I don't know.

[retypepassword]

> Intellij doesn't have aarch64 Linux distributions

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/download-thanks.html...

https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/download/download-thanks.htm...

[dvhh]

I think some of the aarch64 laptop have landed in the Linux kernel source tree.

I am currently using a C630 laptop wich could be considered a predecessor to the discussed model ( with an anemic 4GB of RAM), and following up some botched Windows update (Windows recovery put the system in a worst place). I decided to take the plunge and install Linux.

Hardware support is rough, and depends a lot on firmware file you would need to salvage from the windows partition.

So far without these files, among the most necessary stuff I would like to have.

- Wifi, I a coping with a wifi dongle, wich mean I am out of one of the 2 usb-c ports

- Sound ( usual linux problem, worked around the issue, with another dongle, or Bluetooth audio)

- External display support (worked on windows)

Otherwise, linux experience is leagues ahead of Windows, in terms of boot time and responsiveness. Battery life is great for my use ( mainly write python and C code ). And far as battery life improvement, your mileage can vary, I haven't timed mine yet but can try and will report in a week about it (maybe you ca give me aome pointer to simulate the usual load your would put it through).

- podman work great

- sublime text run as smooth as it is on x86-64

- bios is an UEFI and I dont think it required a signed bootloader, although updating the setting to boot grub was not as straightforward.

- I am mainly using Wayland, with most of the caveats associated to it (Firefox does flicker a lot, so I am mainly using chromium)

On the most annoying side, I don't know if there is a way to configure the lid action, as it put the laptop on standby.

I would recommend, if only for the gain in thinness and if you are traveling a lot with your laptop.

[rhamzeh]

Thanks for that! Probably in a couple of years, as my laptop is still serving me well enough for now. It's also pretty light and still has good battery, so not a ton of benefit there.

If the battery life was doubled (~8+ hours), that definitely would be more intriguing.

But ouch, hadn't had WiFi or sound issues on Linux since the 2009~2010 era, will not be fun to get back to that, though hopefully in a few years as the drivers mature, this would become less of an issue.

> On the most annoying side, I don't know if there is a way to configure the lid action, as it put the laptop on standby.

Even when an external display is connected? That's got to be annoying!

[volf_]

I have one (16GB model), and have (arch) linux on it dual booting with Windows! Started @ https://github.com/ironrobin/archiso-x13s

  * Battery Life. ~6/7 hours max as it currently (linux-x13s 6.4). There is a lot of room for improvement, which will happen as more people tune/tweak.

  * Performance. Honestly, the only noticeable issue is lzma2 compression. It's ass slow, even when using 8 threads. Other then that- Gnome (Wayland), CLion, Firefox, and Rust have no issues. I can't think of any performance issues when comparing it to my HP 14t-ea000, which is a 11th gen i7. 

  * Stability. Firefox occasionally crashes and I've not done enough digging to file a ticket on it yet. The WiFi Drivers crash on suspend (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217239) but it's being worked on. The GPU crashes on startup but recovers. Going to file a kernel report on this one when I get around to it. I'd put it at 95% of what I'd expect on my x86-64 laptop. 

Camera doesn't work (yet), as well as some of the other GPU features. BIOS is limited, and boils down to full access to the security options as well as the to-be-expected Lenovo keyboard options. There's a "beta" Linux boot option, but I didn't need that when I first installed linux. Actually, I'm not sure what I'd want exposed in the BIOS that's not already there. Memory Overclocking?

It runs cooler than my HP, which runs on the hotter side. Port selection is limiting, but having a 5G Modem is cool. Arch has almost all of their packages cross compiled to arm64, and I've not run into an issue where there was a package I needed that wasn't there.

TL;DR. A Very functional laptop. I've started using it as my primary laptop, but still carry my HP with me if I'm traveling somewhere. Give it a few months for the kernel issues to be ironed out and it'll be a very nice laptop.

[volf_]

Funny. Just upgraded to 6.4.1 and got another hour of battery life.

[tracker1]

I have largely the same feelings on this. If you haven't used WSL on Windows, the workflow is actually very nice. You can install and run GUI apps in the Linux environment. I usually use VS Code with remoting for WSL though. My current job and personal setup aren't in windows, but have used it in the past and it's very usable, if not ideal.

For now, sticking with my macbook m1 air for personal use. Though I really don't like the differences in the kb layout and hotkeys from nix or windows.

[nalllar]

I run Linux on it, it works but you need a non mainline kernel (github.com/steev x13s branches iirc) and a dtb in the EFI partition

[sidkshatriya]

What about virtualization? Can you run qemu/firecracker on the system?