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evilmonkey19 3 hours ago

Can someone tell me why there isn't almost any laptop with Linux and ARM? Is it more efficient than x86 though

PhilipRoman 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How is the bootloader/peripheral compatibility on the non-SBC ARM systems these days? Can you plug in a boot disk on different machine and expect it to just work? My main problem with ARM is that many manufacturers act as if they're special little snowflakes and deserve to have their custom patched kernel/bootloader/whatever.

AlotOfReading 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This is the goal of the Arm SystemReady compliance label. The selection is still pretty limited and what's out there is generally buggy, but there's a few boards out there you can buy like the Orion O6 [0]. If you just want a stable system with predictable performance, you're probably better off with a more traditional system though.

[0] https://radxa.com/products/orion/o6/

torginus 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Afaik a lot of bootloaders are proprietary/wonky, a lot of SOCs run custom bootloaders.

However if you do manage to boot things up, hardware with open-source drivers should just work, for example Jeff Geerling has couple of videos on youtube about running his RPi with external AMD graphics cards connected via PCIe, and it works.

dijit 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Software/driver compatibility and rational fear of change from users.

(My work laptop is one of the few ARM laptops: Thinkpad T14s with Quallcomm Snapdragon Elite)

raddan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you think of that laptop? What kind of workloads do you run and how is battery life? What OS? Would you choose it again?

dijit 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Was trying to install Linux on it, though its not working like a standard x86 laptop (for the installer on debian for example).

Battery is good, hardware is really rock solid (though I dislike the new plastic for the keyboard).

Really can’t complain, it’s nearly as good as my Macbook.

It runs Windows 11 today, and everything I need runs fine (jetbrains, rustc, clang, msvc, terraform and of course python).

I’m a technical CTO with infrastructure background, most of my time is spent in spreadsheets these days unfortunately.

jeremyjh 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Chromebooks are essentially this, but not that great for local development.

fragmede 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Depends on which one, and what you want to locally develop.

jeremyjh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is there one that even has a full keyboard?

fragmede 2 hours ago | parent [-]

HP makes a 17" Chromebook if that's what you're after.