I'm still waiting for the apple laptop killer (a 12h+ laptop with plain Ubuntu) but it's still brittle as fuck. I'm so frustrated by the current state of the mobile computing space. I have to have an Apple locked down device, which I hate, just because I want proper battery life.

A aarch64 Ubuntu vm inside MacOS runs faster and lasts more time than a booted up Ubuntu on arm in these devices. This is how far behind these things are.

and what bums me the most is that it's all about software. The hardware is great, but software on Snapdragon is taking a lot of time to catch up and it screams M$ lobby to me

Pretty sure there are plenty of traditional x86 Linux laptops that have north of 12h battery life. System76 comes to mind (mandatory "System76 is just a Clevo wrapper" comment).

Microsoft has definitely put a lot of work into the arm surface laptops. I'm having a good time using a surface 15 inch. I picked the lowest spec model, only 16 GM ram and 256 GB drive. But I use it like a terminal: I run vscode server on either my desktop or a VM, and the vscode client on the laptop. So the actual compiling and I think also the LSP is running remotely, but I still have a responsive editor on the client. The result is phenomenal battery life, 16 hours if not more. It also has the side effect that any build artifacts are produced directly on the server, no more uploading multi-gigabyte containers over my home Internet to the cloud. But of course, it assumes 24/7 internet connection.

I would appreciate a native Linux arm laptop, but this setup works for me in the meantime.

> I'm still waiting for the apple laptop killer (a 12h+ laptop with plain Ubuntu) but it's still brittle as fuck.

Try Intel's Lunar Lake. My Zenbook 14S (S is important here!) does 12h+ on VS Code, browser & meetings (but compilation is remote). The screen is better than on Macbooks (it's high-res OLED), overall build is good. You probably won't be able to run Ubuntu LTS without installing latest kernel, but regular version should do just fine.

If you don't like ASUS, you can also try Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13. It's a bit on the smaller side and costs twice as much, but it's a pretty neat device.

In an alternate universe my hope was AMD builds a killer mobile/embedded Arm APU instead of the failed Opteron A series. Of course this would never happen because what software would run on it? Apple on the other hand steers the entire ship so they had the ability to produce the entire stack. Even MS could not build an Arm ecosystem.

Get a recent AMD or Intel laptop, add Linux, and install TLP. Idk if you'll get 12hr or not, but my Asus PX13 survived a 9hr+ intercontinental flight while working on a C++ codebase including compilation in Sublime Text with clangd LSP plugin (and no, I can't fall asleep on planes lol)

> I have to have an Apple locked down device, which I hate, just because I want proper battery life.

Chicken and egg. The Linux vendors don't have the power to drive ODMs nearly as much as Apple because everyone keeps buying Windows and slapping Linux on it (then complaining online when they have to be the systems integrator themselves, fixing the inevitable razor cuts)

> but software on Snapdragon is taking a lot of time to catch up and it screams M$ lobby to me

On Linux?

The hard reality is that Apple invests in SoftBank, the owner of ARM's IP, and nobody in the Linux (or Windows) world does the same. They really just don't care. There aren't entrenched hardware manufacturers that want to reprise the featureset of UEFI on ARM. You will be waiting forever if you demand an ARM laptop that works like an x86 one with Linux.

ARM has been like this forever, and it's unlikely it will change due to Asahi or Apple Silicon. ARM lives or dies based on Apple's treatment of it, no other corporate stakeholder has comparable control over the ISA.

Last time I was at FOSDEM was about a decade ago, it was kind of ironic to see so much Apple gear around, given the conference tone.

I'd suggest that top non-Apple businesspeople try using a MacBook for a few weeks, hopefully it sparks some fresh thinking and decisions. Like it or not, Apple's advantage in battery life (and processor efficiency) is remarkable. If I recall correctly, Samsung made a real dent in the iPhone's lead with the Galaxy S2 around 2011, four years after the iPhone launched in 2007. But with the M1 chips released in 2020, Apple's lead this time around seems poised to last even longer.

Note: not an Apple fanboy.

I echo that wish.

I'm about to try the Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon Q Elite with Linux so we'll see how it goes.