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.

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.