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.

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!