First Impressions: Lenovo T14s with Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM64 CPU

I upgraded from a 10-year-old Lenovo to a MacBook Pro M1 w/Asahi Linux for a while recently. It convinced me that we're not ready for ARM Linux desktops for general-purpose, regular-person use.

Besides all the crappy Linux desktop software today (I have been trying multiple recent distros out on multiple new laptops... all the Linux desktop stuff now is buggy, features are gone that were there 10 years ago... it's annoying as hell). The ARM experience is one of being a second-class citizen. A ton of apps are released as AppImages or Snaps/Flatpaks. But they have to be built for both X86_64 and ARM64, and extremely few are built for the latter. Even when they are built for it, they have their own bugs to be worked around, and there's fewer users, so you wait longer for a bugfix. The end result is you have fewer choices, compatibility and support.

I love the idea of an ARM desktop. But it's going to cause fragmentation of available developer (and corporate/3rd-party) resources. ARM devices individually are even more unique than X86_64 gear is, so each one requires more integration. I'm sticking to X86_64 so I don't have to deal with another set of problems.

One hopeful note: the developers for the Snapdragon X Elite are active on the kernel mailing list, and they are supplying patches for specific laptops, including the T14s. Now I run Debian, so i don't use AppImages or Snaps or Flatpaks, but I expect to have a fully functional T14s Gen 6 running Trixie when it is released as stable next year, assuming Trixie uses kernel 6.12 or (hopefully) 6.13.

Counterpoint: I've been on an M2 Macbook running NixOS-via-Asahi-installer for about a year, and I've run into maybe 2 applications that I cannot find in the Nix repos or flathub. I have a stable, fast, long-lasting machine running Hyprland and all the productivity software I've needed. I'm currently missing an internal microphone and, I believe, Thunderbolt (USB-C works fine) but this machine is faster than and as stable as it was when it had macOS on it.

I am as general purpose, regular person as you're going to find, in this world at least. I stare at a sentence like "In a functional programming language, everything is a function" and just blink. But a few months of blood and suffering to learn Nix/NixOS and I am managing the family's computers from a single repository and working faster than ever.

It's interesting to see the arm building issues still mentioned. I've been patching many packages in nixpkgs for apple silicon, and I can remember only one which had any kind of arm-related problem rather than darwin-specific. Snap/appimage packages have their issues of maintainers needing to spend the extra time. But sources? Not in my experience - I'd be interested to hear some examples.

What software do you add your family use on these machines? Do you need or use parental controls? Gaming?

No and, currently, no, though Asahi has the accelerated graphics and an x86 compatibility layer sort of working now, so I imagine that will come soon enough.

The usuals are there, like Libreoffice, though I use browser-based MS Office too. Firefox and all my plugins Just Work.

I do a ton of photo work with Darktable, which I have come to appreciate after years of fighting it. Writing tools. Software development tools. It's arguably overpowered for my needs, but that also translates into 16-hour battery life (less than macos, but plenty), dead quiet, and a machine that does everything I ask without complaint.

For the kiddo, it's mainly about configuring and locking down the machine ... and getting it back up and running quickly if he breaks something. I've been using off-lease, years-old Thinkpads for him. No games to speak of, but he's more of an xbox kid anyway. I should probably do parental controls, but I have that largely handled at the DNS level anyway.

they also butchered their entire dev kit rollouts and didn't launch with any sort of (promised) Linux support, I'm pretty sure time wise macran had Linux booting on M1s faster than Qualcom got any sort of Linux movement going on their own hardware.

I sadly am inclined to agree a bit about the Linux desktop stuff, I've been trying to get a nice simple XFCE linux desktop on a used thinkpad I recently picked up, so far tried Debian and Mint and they both have some issues with the keyboard mute button (it flickers on/off rapidly when I press it the first time, and the keyboard doesn't respond to input until I press the mute toggle again). There's other stuff like just weird quirks, like you can't have a key command like Super-R and then also a key command of just Super, because when you try to press Super-R it just instantly triggers the key command you assigned to just Super! Like, while I'm still holding it down! Is it not a modifier?! Or then there's something unmuting my speakers and mic every time the machine wakes from sleep/lock, and I think it's due to wireplumber, but Debian stable's wireplumber version is literally a year old (wtf?), so I can't find documentation on how I can alter this default behaviour (especially because this version of wireplumber uses lua for configuration? also wtf?) … No clue. (Also why does so much Linux software lack man pages?) … haha, that went on a tangent but it's been a surprisingly frustrating experience!

I believed the dream back in 2000.

Eventually I moved into VMWare Workstation, for GNU/Linux stuff on the desktop, with an aging Asus netbook on the side.

Nowadays, the netbook is dead, its used replaced by tablet, and my desktops are Windows/WSL (for Linux containers only, started on demand).

At work our workstations are a mix of Windows and macOS, leaving GNU/Linux on the servers.

Not even x86 is 100% usable on laptops, meaning supporting every single feature, and late nights to fix stuff eventually gets old.

Stay out of GNOME-land, those creeps go nuts for taking away features!

How do you know it's faster than when it had MacOS on it? Confused!