[dllu]

Agreed. On the computer hardware side:

* x86 chips can surpass the M series cpus in multithreaded performance, but are still lagging in singlethreaded performance and power efficiency

* Qualcomm kinda fumbled the Snapdragon X Elite launch with nonexistent Linux support and shoddy Windows stability, but here's to hoping that they "turn over a new leaf" with the X2.

Actually, some Snapdragon X Elite laptops do run Linux now, but performance is not great as there were some weird regressions and anyway newer chips have caught up [1].

On the build quality side, basically all the PCs are still lagging behind Apple, e.g. yesterday's rant post about the Framework laptop [2] touched on a lot of important points. Of course, there are the Thinkpads, which are still built decently but are quite expensive. Some of the Chinese laptops like the Honor MagicBooks could be attractive and some reddit threads confirm getting Linux working on them, but they are hard to get in the US. That said, at least many non-Apple laptops have decent trackpads and really nice screens nowadays.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46375174

[999900000999]

I have no faith in Qualcomm to even make me basic gestures towards the Linux community.

All I want is an easy way to install Linux on one of the numerous Snapdragon laptops. I think the Snapdragon Thinkpad might work, but none of the other really do.

A 400$ Arm laptop with good Linux support would be great, but it's never ever going to happen.

[cromka]

Facts are Linux support has heavily accelerated from both Qualcomm and Linaro on their behalf. Anyone who watches Linux ARM mailing lists can attest that.

Things have definitely changed, a lot.

[walterbell]

Google has previously delivered good Linux support on Arm Chromebooks and is expected to launch unified Android+ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2 Arm devices in 2026.

[valianteffort]

I bought a refurb gen 4 thinkpad on amazon for like $350 and it arrived almost brand new.

Installed arch, setup some commands to underclock the processor on login and easily boost it when I'm compiling.

Battery life is great but I'm not running a GUI either. Good machine for when I want to avoid distractions and just code.

[blks]

My personal beef with Thinkpads is the screen. Most of the thinkpads I’ve encountered in my life (usually pretty expensive corporate ones) had shitty FHD screens. I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.

[dllu]

Old Thinkpads are great! I used to have a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6 with Intel Core i7 8640U, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD. I installed Arch Linux on it with Sway.

[baobun]

> x86 chips can surpass the M series cpus in multithreaded performance, but are still lagging in singlethreaded performance

Nodding along with the rest but isn't this backwards? Are M series actually outperforming an Intel i9 P-core or Ryzen 9X in raw single-threaded performance?

[Telaneo]

Not in raw performance, no, but they're only beat out by i9s and the like, which are very power hungry. If you care even a little bit about performance per watt, the M series are far superior.

Have a look at Geekbench's results.[1] Ignore the top ones, since they're invalid and almost certainly cheated (click to check). The iPads and such lower down are all legit, but the same goes for some of the i9s inbetween.

And honestly, the fact that you have to go up to power hungry desktop processors to even find something to compete with the chip that goes in an (admittedly high-end) iPad, is somewhat embarrassing on its face, and not for Apple.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/singlecore

[dllu]

Yes, the M4 is still outperforming the desktop 9950X in single-threaded performance on several benchmarks like Geekbench and Cinebench 2024 [1]. Compared to the 9955HX, which is the same physical chip as the 9950X but lower clocked for mobile, the difference is slightly larger. But the 16 core 9950X is obviously much better than the base M4 (and even the 16 core M4 Max, which has only 12 P cores and 4 E cores) at multithreaded applications.

However, the M2 in the blog post is from 2022 and isn't quite as blazingly fast in single thread performance.

[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-8-cores-vs-am...

[nottorp]

Does an i9 P-core or Ryzen 9X run on 3.9 W while posting on HN?

[ksec]

The closest laptop to MacBook quality is surprisingly the Microsoft Surface Laptop.

As to x86, Zen 6 will be AMD's first major architecture rework since Apple demonstrated what is possible with wide decode. ( Well more accurately it should be since the world take notice because it happened long before M1 ). It still likely wont be close to M5 or even M4 with Single Threaded Performance / Watt, but hopefully it will be close.

[andrekandre]

  > Actually, some Snapdragon X Elite laptops do run Linux now, but performance is not great as there were some weird regressions and anyway newer chips have caught up [1].

ohh thanks for that link; i was thinking about updating to the latest on my asusbook s15 but i think ill stick with the current ubuntu concept for now... saved me some trouble!

[geokon]

Honor strangely enough doesnt make any efforts to really support Linux

The machine quality is pretty damn good, but Huawei machines are still better. Apple level of quality. And Huawei releases their machines with Linux preinstalled

The company to watch is Wiko. Its their French spin off to sidestep their chip ban. They might put out some very nice laptops, but a bit tbd

[erremerre]

Dealing with Honor support is a pain. They don't understand absolutely anything and is impossible to get them out of their script if you have a problem.

I have a Honor 200 pro, and the software is buggy and constantly replaces user configurations with their defaults every 3 or 4 days.

I would avoid anything Honor in the future at any cost.

[andrepd]

> On the build quality side, basically all the PCs are still lagging behind Apple,

This is an oft-repeated meme, but not really true. Thinkpads, high-end lightweight gaming laptops like the Asus G14... There are many x86 laptops with excellent build quality.