I’ve been running Linux for 14 months now and loving it.
My laptop is a HP Victus gaming pc, which is bulky and heavy, but Its powerfull.
I find myself laying on the couch more and developing from there half the time or doing laptop stuff more and more from the couch.
Lugging it to work and back is also not great.
In October I can buy a new laptop through work and write off half the price against tax, honestly I want everything a mac book offers.
Good solid build quality, not plastic. No GPU needed, just light weight, long battery life, shouldn’t heat up too much, good trackpad etc.
But fuck apple and their walled garden, so I want something Linux.
ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it? What are my options?
Or do I just go with x86 and compromise
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ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it?
to paraphrase the saying, “Millions of Raspberry Pi can’t be wrong”
I use a MacBook M1 Air with Asahi Linux (using Fedora + Nix home-manager) for programming and web stuff and it works decently aside from a few missing features, although I hate the soldered storage and RAM. I might get a Framework or MNT laptop when it dies.
With ARM Macbooks, you need to look into what models are specifically supported by Asahi Linux. It doesn’t seem to work on the newest models, at least not right away. This means either the CPU not being supported at all, or possibly missing drivers for some of the hardware.
The main question, where are the Snapdragon Laptops and is Linux support there?
ARM support highly depends on the device tree and drivers, as poorly it is often not standardised it seems.
An m2 Macbook would be the easy option, but soldered storage is horrible. Mac minis etc need a stupid adapter but then you can use NVMEs.
Ironically the best arm laptop for linux is a macbook. https://asahilinux.org/
Just to mention, a used or refurb M1 or M2. I don’t believe anything newer is supported, so save some cash IMO.
My pinebook Pro has been rocking it with fedora as its primary OS. The most issues it seems to have is with the wifi drivers after release updates. I’ve had good experiences with Debian/Armbian on SBCs too.
My only advice on getting an ARM device to run Linux is to check the wireless used in your desired device has good existing support. It’s a bit of a pain having to dig around for a no-fail dongle just to update drivers for the internal hardware.
The biggest issue I’ve had with my Pinebook Pro is getting any external display to work. I have bought multiple dongles and none of them are working. In fact, there are multiple smaller issues all different depending on the OS installed. I settled on Manjaro but wifi stops working after coming back from suspend, and it needs to be rebooted. The speakers are weak too.
And there’s software compatibility. Most of the software have ARM packages in multiple versions, but sometimes it doesn’t exists or can’t work. Like wine.
It’s not very polished and it requires knowing tech and Linux a good deal. It’s functional enough and could be useful for development, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an everyday laptop.
I tried to have it nearby and use it from time to time but I just end up getting back to my x86 laptop.
Manjaro had such a strong start on the pbps, but maaaaaan did it feel like it just went to trash towards the end. That’s why I switched to fedora on mine.
About the display out, I actually found that there was something about the port (iirc) where the display out only worked in one way. You could plug in a usbc cable, not get video out, unplug and flip it, plug it in, and you’ve got video out. Of course many distros broke it altogether somewhere during the kernel v5.xx.
I will say that during the times I ran Manjaro or Arch on it, I was pleasantly surprised how many things from the AUR I could get to build/run on just by asking yay to try!
I agree though, support and the device are not polished enough to immediately recommend for daily driving. But I also saw last night that there’s more distros advertising images for it. I may have to grab an SD and give them a whirl, see if things have improved. Regardless, it was a poc that definitely showed ARM could be a viable alternative to x64 in laptops
Is the wifi chip soldered? If not, you might be able to replace it with m.2/PCIe…
It is. Iirc when the m.2/pcie board for the pbp was released a lot of people did use for alternate wifi chips. I opted for a 2260 SSD. I may revisit the laptop and see if it’s hammered out now though
Lenovo x13s Gen1, as a light/mobile server with ubuntu/arch arm: nice
for media production (like music), not useful…
Gentoo supports ARM quite well (obviously), but I’m not sure what new hardware is out there that has an open enough firmware (or that can be flashed with coreboot) that will allow a Linux install.
I am a linux beginner: Why obviously?
Gentoo compiles everything. Like, even the command is like “compile world”. It’s not as straight edge as LinuxFromScratch and AFAIK they’ve started having precompiled packages sometime in the last few years but the core approach is that you configure compilation flags system-wide and recompile whatever needs recompilation every update
Yes, the source code gets compiled directly on the machine (or indirectly FOR the machine).
This, of course, assumes one can actually boot a kernel not developed specifically for the machine.
Some modern boot loaders / managers are locked (Asus does this a lot), so you’re stuck with whatever they put on the machine.
They’re locking down kernels now?
“They” probably are, I don’t know who “they” is but it’s definitely not Asus (at least not their upper-end stuff). Source: bought an Asus “gaming” laptop last year and installed Linux with no issues.
Edit: clarification on gaming laptop manufacturer (specified that it was Asus which I initially neglected to do in above comment)
I think the biggest question will be peripherals. Having a laptop where there are no drivers for its WiFi or similar can be tough. Otherwise I’ve been happy with my arch arm servers
Sometimes there might be no docker image for base image of your project. But you should be able to build it yourself
my pinebook pro has been bricked for at least 3 years now. still dead.
same w mine on the 3rd day i received it; i updated using cli and it no longer booted.
it won’t boot from SD? Or was it a bad spi flash?
it does nothing. might as well not be plugged in. at this point I don’t remember what killed it. maybe trying to transition to another os.
I get that, one of my pis is in that boat. I’ve been putting off making a boot disk for the distro and chrooting in to reinstall the system.
on the bright side, barring physical damage or an spi issue, you should be able to get it booting again. If it might’ve been an install issue, you could force SD boot, reinitialize the emmc, and reinstall. Those things were really good about not being able to fully brick easily.
I wish I could recommend Arch Linux Arm, but it’s really poorly maintained. Literally zero packages available for update for months on end. And no hope of improvement in sight.
My experience is mostly with Raspberry Pis. (I’m typing this on a Raspberry Pi in fact.) I still have a couple of Pis on Arch. And the one I’m on right now is running Raspian. I have plans to migrate them all to Gentoo some day, but I want to build a build server first and I’m currently deep in another project. I’ll get to it eventually.
Raspian is boring and maybe a little simplified and restricted. But it’s fine.
I run a Pi400 every now and then… It’s not setting any speed records, and starts to lag out after 10 tabs, but it runs all day on an external phone battery. There’s the odd app that nobody bothered porting to ARM, but I have more trouble with Arm Windows than Arm Linux.
I had a pinebook 1080p, same exact experience. Fine, not fantastic, good battery life. It keeled over and died after a year though.
