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evilmonkey19 | 3 months ago

Can someone tell me why there isn't almost any laptop with Linux and ARM? Is it more efficient than x86 though

discuss

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dijit|3 months ago

Software/driver compatibility and rational fear of change from users.

(My work laptop is one of the few ARM laptops: Thinkpad T14s with Quallcomm Snapdragon Elite)

raddan|3 months ago

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you think of that laptop? What kind of workloads do you run and how is battery life? What OS? Would you choose it again?

PhilipRoman|3 months ago

How is the bootloader/peripheral compatibility on the non-SBC ARM systems these days? Can you plug in a boot disk on different machine and expect it to just work? My main problem with ARM is that many manufacturers act as if they're special little snowflakes and deserve to have their custom patched kernel/bootloader/whatever.

AlotOfReading|3 months ago

This is the goal of the Arm SystemReady compliance label. The selection is still pretty limited and what's out there is generally buggy, but there's a few boards out there you can buy like the Orion O6 [0]. If you just want a stable system with predictable performance, you're probably better off with a more traditional system though.

[0] https://radxa.com/products/orion/o6/

torginus|3 months ago

Afaik a lot of bootloaders are proprietary/wonky, a lot of SOCs run custom bootloaders.

However if you do manage to boot things up, hardware with open-source drivers should just work, for example Jeff Geerling has couple of videos on youtube about running his RPi with external AMD graphics cards connected via PCIe, and it works.

CCs|3 months ago

It is a pain to make any new platform useful enough for large adoption. Apple made a lot of effort to get MacBook M1 useable, same for AWS with Graviton. Eventually it will be adopted for Linux laptops too, even without a specific vendor focusing on it, but it will take time.

jeremyjh|3 months ago

Chromebooks are essentially this, but not that great for local development.

tomComb|3 months ago

So then one solution might be to buy a Chromebook, and put regular Linux on it? I don’t think the Chromebook are locked down.

fragmede|3 months ago

Depends on which one, and what you want to locally develop.