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First Impressions: Lenovo T14s with Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM64 CPU

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213 points cnst | 2 comments | 15 Nov 24 20:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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0xbadcafebee ◴[15 Nov 24 23:22 UTC] No.42152436[source]▶
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.

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1. raegis ◴[15 Nov 24 23:48 UTC] No.42152670[source]▶
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.
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2. SG- ◴[16 Nov 24 05:46 UTC] No.42154617[source]▶
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.