First Impressions: Lenovo T14s with Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM64 CPU

Any issues or things you wish you had known with your current Parallels/Ubuntu set up? Asking since I've been considering doing the same thing

I'm actually thinking of switching from a Mac back to the PC, since everything is done in a browser anyways, regardless of the system, but the lack of the fanless laptops in the PC world isn't promising.

ThinkPad X13s Snapdragon was fanless, but it's a bit old now, plus, only 2x USB-C, without any USB-A ports, and a screen that doesn't open 180°, unlike any other ThinkPad, meh.

So far, I’ve had a very good user experience, but I haven’t yet tried using it exclusively for an extended period to compare its battery life with that of a bare Apple Silicon macOS. Mapping shortcuts now...

Windows sucks nowadays.

For work Ive had to come back.... it's gotten bad. Ads everywhere. Search bar that sucks. Weird hand gestures that empties your screen.

What happened? Win7 is probably the best UX ever. Now its unusable.

Mitchell Hashimoto has written extensively about his use of Linux in a VM on macOS. He published a NixOS configuration[1] which seems easy to use.

I recently bought a Mac mini M4 to experiment with this setup, and am strongly considering getting a MBP if it works as advertised. As a longtime ThinkPad user and F/LOSS enthusiast, it feels awful giving money to Apple to run Linux as a second-class citizen, but honestly there is just no comparable hardware that does what Apple has accomplished.

[1]: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config

The x13s is still quite quick and useable - especially since you can pick them up for a song on the used market. The display only opening to ~135 degrees is a bummer though.

One small tip I didn't appreciate for far too long with "mac-peer" laptops that have fans is to use them unplugged. My laptop almost never spins up fans when it is unplugged, and I can get a good batch of work done with the battery levels of today and fast charge over lunch. It's still not quite as ideal nor as long a battery life as Mac. But it feels so beautiful.

For the first time on Linux I feel better, like I am not just making sacrafices for values but like the actual whole all-around experience is better in most ways compared to my work Mac (M2 Pro so fans abound and not as aesthetically pleasing as the Airs IMO). It's instantly snappy, I have a nice large SSD, I've already swapped out RAM, no issues with key software, I have a theme with a desktop experience I prefer over the Mac one, and I can go to a presentation and type without fans stressing me out. As someone in AI for a while, personally, I don't value GPUs or NPUs, but that would be a difference. That's really leaps and bounds over Linux from 2016 or 2010 on Laptops.

I have been running Ubuntu inside Parallels on an M1 MacBook for several years now, and am in general quite happy with it. What makes it less than ideal is e.g. that only OpenGL 3.3 is supported in Linux guests (Windows guests get 4.1), but for some reason the Vulkan support is actually quite good, and allows me to run the graphics tools I need. Having most AppImages out there unavailable on ARM64 is also sometimes a problem, but that's not Parallels' fault.

Parallels has some glitches (graphical flicker when it runs low on guest memory, less than stellar trackpad scrolling) but is otherwise very stable. I like that I have access to Linux and macOS at the same time, the other side is just a 3 finger swipe away, and cut-n-paste and shared folders work. Sound and video all work, though for things like zoom calls I tend to use the macOS side. All runs happily together with 16GB RAM for each side (and I often have both xcode and android studio open on the macOS side while compiling large projects on the Linux side).

Which device are you talking about?