The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
dev-eloper.com
dev-eloper.com
But not sure how the dev workflow would be: Podman, IntelliJ, Sublime Text, etc.. And some casual stuff like Calibre, Thunderbird, Joplin.
Oh and how much would the battery life improvement be. I already get 4~5+ hours on my 5 year old Thinkpad, so an improvement to 6 hours is not really worth it.
How is the BIOS and openness on these systems? I always heard the arm laptops are way more locked down than the x86 ones.
I'd love a modern ARM based Linux laptop, but I also know that unless it's got mainline kernel support or a dedicated Linux friendly vendor (like Pine) behind it, it's lifetime and updates are going to be extremely limited. And that doesn't even consider graphics API support, which will have an impact on rather basic things, such as YouTube video playback.
Honestly, the only viable ARM laptop with good battery life and modern day performance is an Apple MacBook Air or Pro, which has a very impressive community project behind it. But even that is still incomplete and might peter out if some key figures burn out or become uninterested or preoccupied with for-pay work or whatever.
Is that the case? I would've thought the devices present in 8cx are similar to the other Snapdragon 8 series which would probably be well supported upstream? Or do they linger in a GKI tree before landing upstream?
Maybe the exclusivity between QCOM/MS is mutual and they'll be able to partner with vendors like Canonical in the future.
Personally - I would love an XPS13 ARM linux laptop, hopefully Dell decides to jump on the bandwagon. I have owned i5/i7 XPS13s for several years now and am looking forward to ARM if they can make one that performs well.
Also, a computer without a single fan so I can comfortably use it on my bed? With possibility to replace it's SSD? It sounded a lot like my next laptop.
God, I have experienced the exact opposite with Linux on laptops. Battery management is so bad I am considering moving to a Macbook.
I've experimented a lot (mainly on Fedora) and the biggest offenders are browsers, but also sometimes Gnome gets in a bad state and eats up a lot of CPU. It's often gjs eating CPU so it may be an app I'm leaving open or even an extension. I've tried to narrow it down but haven't fully figured it out yet.
But, if you keep only a small number of tabs open and close everything you aren't using, battery life on Linux can be really great.
It has been ruthlessly optimized to save power for servers with greatly documented hardware structures.
It has not been optimized for Desktop OS, for Bluetooth, Sleep, WiFi, graphics card power saving etc.
I am a tab zero guy, for the record. I've been using computers since Windows 3, so I'm very sensitive towards intensive processes.
My wife can watch netflix on her (5 year old) Macbook for hours. I lose 13% battery life on one episode. I leave my laptop on sleep off the charger, and it is dead sleeping after a few hours. Linux users may hack their way to lower battery usage, but they still do not have it like Mac does.
You must simply leave it on the charger and turn it off when you are done. They are portable desktops.
i've clocked ~8 hours of media time with a T420s with an ultrabay battery and tlp/powertop reporting an average of 6-8w during the process. Regular battery + the extra ultrabay battery put the capacity up to about 7.7Ah; about the same range of battery capacity as a newish macbook pro.
a t420s is a very old core machine at this point. I would suspect the same conditions with a similar amount of battery with a modern processor could do a lot better; but i'm getting too old to sit in front of a screen for 8+ hours of media time, honestly -- and lately with USB-PD and power banks I have been skewing towards buying ultrabook style laptops and accessorizing via USB3 rather than with proprietary expansion slots.
I don't know what the media time on something like a laptop with an N100/linux + a powerbank, but I suspect it'd be quite a long time.
typo: meant 7.7aH
I went from a constantly-overheated Linux laptop to a completely calm Linux laptop, on the same hardware, distro, and DE. Checking for unnecessary processes that eat CPU, spurious ACPI events, overly-heavyweight browser tabs goes a long way. Making sure the browser uses hardware support to play YouTube is another heavyweight.
It takes some time, but much less time than I had expected.
And to be specific, I suffer from bad hardware/software communication. On a linux laptop, no less (System76, which I would never recommend). Linux S3 sleep is not hardware sleep, I lose a lot of battery there. WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity either has to be battery draining or have poor performance.
The battery my laptop has itself is also too small, and could only get moderately good life if it had an optimized OS anyway. Again, a Linux-first laptop.
I am sure if I switched to a Lenovo with a big battery that I would be better off than I am now, so I'm also complaining a bit about my hardware. But the problem is still there.
With Apple M2 paired with an OS designed for it, with high end batteries and screens, I don't see any pairing of (laptop) hardware and software competing, on a fundamental level. Every other system is second class.
Edit: ACPI events is the key word here, and it is not worth anyone's time to wade through that garbage to get sane laptop performance. The ACPI stuff isn't even designed for end users to alter, and it is hacked together due to all the hardware variations out there. It is simply doing the best job it can, on average.
There's kind of an implicit lie when people say linux works on laptops at all. It works on MOST laptop configurations in MOST functions. But it BARELY works in others. You find this once you dig sufficiently deep enough.
I keep my laptop plugged in. It's pathetic.
If I were fine with someone else making all these decisions for me, because making them myself is more painful than accepting someone else's not entirely comfortable decision, I'd go for an Apple device, no doubt.
Tweaking the OS to play nicely with particular hardware is key. Apple are very good at it. I suppose e.g. System 76 also tweak Pop OS to run especially smoothly on their hardware. Linux is very much ready for that: when I worked at Google (2011-15), I had a Linux laptop with a Google's internal variety of Ubuntu, adapted to a relatively few hardware models they used as desktops and laptops. It worked basically flawlessly, and my T420 had like 6 hours of battery runtime browsing and coding. All I had to customize was the GTK theme and such.
Maybe something like "tweak packs" that adapt Linux to some very specific widespread hardware could be a hit.
No this is completely down your hard hardware
Forced to use Mac for work, the previous Macbook Pro would lose charge _while plugged in_! The battery goes empty, it shuts off and I wait for it to recharge while off.
They recently changed mine to an M1. Battery is much better than the previous generation and could be good, so long as you're not using it for anything. As soon as the IDE/Zoom/Docker/what have you spins up, it loses charge. It is slower at loses charge while plugged in, but so long as you are not using it except for note taking, I would not trust away from a power source.
If I don't have a power source nearby, I turn everything off and switch my dev workflow to Sublime to prolong the battery.
I don't have to suffer any of these shenanigans under Linux. Granted, I have a Thinkpad, which has great Linux support, so that definitely helps.
Usage (varies over time...): software development (JetBrains, NetBeans, VSCode, Sublime, vim), google meet, slack, rancher desktop, docker desktop (being phased out), capture one, creative cloud, OBS, virtual desktops for local testing.
We have had self-discharge on HP ProBooks and EliteBooks but that was due to a bad USB-C implementation and was fixed with third-party chargers. Some older Dells had it too, but that was with dual power input (USB-C and classic barrel) and switching over to the legacy chargers didn't have that issue. Those run a mix of Windows and Linux.
...yeah, I was wondering that too. This seems like a job for a Gentoo system, compiled from the ground up with "-march=native". Would love to know how that would turn out performance-wise, in comparison to Windows.
GKISS if you want glibc.
Intellij doesn't have aarch64 Linux distributions, you can kind of hack it together it's completely unsupported. Not sure about Joplin but I expect it would be ok (I think it's electron based? VS code works ok too).
Re locked-down: pbp can run many different Linux variants, and boots with tow-boot bootloader. Hopefully that would support ThinkPad to, but I don't know.
https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/download-thanks.html...
https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/download/download-thanks.htm...
I am currently using a C630 laptop wich could be considered a predecessor to the discussed model ( with an anemic 4GB of RAM), and following up some botched Windows update (Windows recovery put the system in a worst place). I decided to take the plunge and install Linux.
Hardware support is rough, and depends a lot on firmware file you would need to salvage from the windows partition.
So far without these files, among the most necessary stuff I would like to have.
- Wifi, I a coping with a wifi dongle, wich mean I am out of one of the 2 usb-c ports
- Sound ( usual linux problem, worked around the issue, with another dongle, or Bluetooth audio)
- External display support (worked on windows)
Otherwise, linux experience is leagues ahead of Windows, in terms of boot time and responsiveness. Battery life is great for my use ( mainly write python and C code ). And far as battery life improvement, your mileage can vary, I haven't timed mine yet but can try and will report in a week about it (maybe you ca give me aome pointer to simulate the usual load your would put it through).
- podman work great
- sublime text run as smooth as it is on x86-64
- bios is an UEFI and I dont think it required a signed bootloader, although updating the setting to boot grub was not as straightforward.
- I am mainly using Wayland, with most of the caveats associated to it (Firefox does flicker a lot, so I am mainly using chromium)
On the most annoying side, I don't know if there is a way to configure the lid action, as it put the laptop on standby.
I would recommend, if only for the gain in thinness and if you are traveling a lot with your laptop.
If the battery life was doubled (~8+ hours), that definitely would be more intriguing.
But ouch, hadn't had WiFi or sound issues on Linux since the 2009~2010 era, will not be fun to get back to that, though hopefully in a few years as the drivers mature, this would become less of an issue.
> On the most annoying side, I don't know if there is a way to configure the lid action, as it put the laptop on standby.
Even when an external display is connected? That's got to be annoying!
* Battery Life. ~6/7 hours max as it currently (linux-x13s 6.4). There is a lot of room for improvement, which will happen as more people tune/tweak.
* Performance. Honestly, the only noticeable issue is lzma2 compression. It's ass slow, even when using 8 threads. Other then that- Gnome (Wayland), CLion, Firefox, and Rust have no issues. I can't think of any performance issues when comparing it to my HP 14t-ea000, which is a 11th gen i7.
* Stability. Firefox occasionally crashes and I've not done enough digging to file a ticket on it yet. The WiFi Drivers crash on suspend (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217239) but it's being worked on. The GPU crashes on startup but recovers. Going to file a kernel report on this one when I get around to it. I'd put it at 95% of what I'd expect on my x86-64 laptop.
It runs cooler than my HP, which runs on the hotter side. Port selection is limiting, but having a 5G Modem is cool. Arch has almost all of their packages cross compiled to arm64, and I've not run into an issue where there was a package I needed that wasn't there.
TL;DR. A Very functional laptop. I've started using it as my primary laptop, but still carry my HP with me if I'm traveling somewhere. Give it a few months for the kernel issues to be ironed out and it'll be a very nice laptop.
I'll try running firecracker later and see if it'll boot.
For now, sticking with my macbook m1 air for personal use. Though I really don't like the differences in the kb layout and hotkeys from nix or windows.
I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical day, I run full builds quite often so this really matters to me. The difference between waiting 5 minutes or 1.5 is really important to me. During this build, 250 integration tests run with 20 threaads maxing out all of the cpu cores.
This windows laptop is being described as a lack luster i5 sounds like it would be a hard no for me. That and all the other issues (the usual meh touchpad, the underwhelming GPU, etc.) makes for an overpriced laptop that just isn't worth having. You can probably get something way nicer for the money. Including a mac.
Since my laptop is basically just a thin client used for ssh, vnc, and a web browser, it’s super easily replaced.
Cant people detect when their offline machines are being/have been hacked?
So I can connect to my home network over wireguard, and SSH to my desktop. VS Code + Remoting extensions work great for this... almost like editing locally, but running remotely. The integrated terminal in VS Code is invaluable when doing this.
Of course, configuring correctly a secure firewall requires some expertise, but it should not be too difficult to find online resources or someone willing to help.
I have done exactly like this for accessing remotely my desktop during the last two decades, without any problems whatsoever.
I think the demographics depends heavily on industry. I know many people doing 3D work and they all use desktops these days.
Anyway, I get all the "portability" of a laptop (with my display, keyboard, and trackpad(!) in bed), but all the performance of an honest-to-Arceus desktop, with a full desktop 12400F (boosting up to 5.2GHz on all 6 cores at a cool 130W) and a full desktop RTX 3060 12GB (I regret not getting the Ti for performance reasons, but for VRAM reasons this is acceptable since I do ML work).
Personally I use a desktop at a standing desk from 9-5 and a 13" laptop around the house/on the deck.
I'm likely going to upgrade from the Dell XPS 13 to a MacBook Air, but the desktop is a higher priority. She could use some upgrades.
But also there has been a shift to cloud instances that provide the flexibility you say at the price of renouncing ownership of the machine. Especially for GPU-based computations.
I do know a ton of people who live out of a laptop tho. I can sorta see the appeal depending but the lack of display real estate and how low the screen is and all is just a nonstarter for me for any long duration work.
And plugging up to a dock or what passes for a dock these days and external monitors and keyboards etc is a flaky annoying PITA.
My biggest annoyance is that Motu don’t have ARM64 drivers for their audio interfaces, so I can’t use the one I have for microphone input. I’ve tried asking - but it doesn’t seem like it’s even on their roadmap, which is unfortunate. I’m pretty sure they license the Thesycon driver which does now support ARM64 [0] - but I guess they need to either update or just build the ARM64 version… The inbox class driver doesn’t work because Motu use implicit feedback.
I'm surprised the author is using these under emulation. Surely they'd run at completely native performance if you just rub the through WSL2? Linux distributions have had ARM based distributions for ages.
If he was stuck using windows, maybe best bet would have been to run an X server and run IntelliJ etc inside WSL itself.
You'd lose out on things like hardware accelerated graphics but reading your description it sounds like that's not really something you rely on anyway.
Looking at the US Apple Store right now, it has the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro (10-core) cpu + 32GB ram and 1TB storage as US$2599, rather an US$3099.
Seems outright cheaper than the Thinkpad x13s.
If something has a $2500 price tag but always has a deal where you can take it only for $1500 then the real price is $1500, not $2500.
I have not looked recently at the Dell site, but in previous years, for many years, every time when I have looked at Dell Precision mobile workstations, they always claimed that the price that what listed at that moment was more than one thousand dollars less than the "normal" price.
I use native Chromium on my Windows-on-ARM laptop (a couple of generations older than the one reviewed). It runs really well and the only drawback is missing DRM stuff so some videos won't play. YouTube almost always works, but most other non-youtube videos don't. For those I can fall back to Edge. I'm looking forward to Google releasing a native build of Chrome.
I'm like the author, I consider the M MacBooks very impressive but I dislike the OS itself.
And it was very unexpected that Chrome underperform so much, without it it's a complete deal breaker for me.
But I think the author is using Chrome under emulation, so bad performance is expected.
I'd assume all the low-hanging fruit is _long_ gone there, though.
yes? That's the entire reason why SoC exists.
I run a x86-64 laptop with Linux AND decicated graphics (Ryzen 6850u and Radeon 6800S) and get 6-10 hours of battery life while developing.
Granted, that's after quite a bit of tweaking - I've configured my monitor to go to 60hz, limit the CPU to only 4 cores/8 threads and 2200MHz while on battery. I write Rust with rust-analyzer so the CPU is constantly in use, and my browser of choice (Firefox) is far less optimized for battery life than any chrome-based browser is on Windows.
This gives me a laptop with no concessions with regards to compatibility and it's probably running loops around this ARM based chip, even when running at my tuned-down power settings.
I'd love to have a Linux compatible ARM laptop, but if they don't give you real world double digit battery life, why bother?
Sometimes I'll unplug to bring it to an overnight christmas party or camping to watch a movie at night. Then I'll probably end up plugging it in when I arrive.
Just remembered, one time I brought my laptop to a real estate meeting, and it was so boring I did work during it. But the meeting was over in an hour.
I'm sure some people like having their computer not plugged in, but a docked laptop is so nice.
Do we really need more than 6 hours of never being plugged in?
I've heard of a usecase, bus trips with buses that don't have 120V outlets... Its pretty niche.
Slower than a 3 years old M1...
It's 2023 people..
In the worst case, I wait an extra fraction of a second with a bad CPU.
With a bad GPU, you are basically excluded from the latest technology.
I'm sure ARM really wants to advertise that CPU is relevant, but it continues to be nearly irrelevant when you buy something a laptop with a dedicated GPU. (Its good enough)
RE ML stuff, do people actually do the heavy lifting for that _on laptops_ much?
This is kind of my point.
What actual CPU stuff is done in 2023?
Its why Apple's marketing focuses so much on battery life. For a year, they won a competition that no one had cared to win.
A 'slow' process (±10s) taking 1 second longer won't seem that much slower, but a fast process (±100ms) taking ten times as long does definitely become problematic.
As for AI, it's mostly irrelevant what your local machines does, unless you are an end-user (i.e. you are running a model from a vendor on a local accelerator for local processing instead of remote processing). Development happens on remote farms and on-line usage also happens on remote farms.
I can picture wanting to do nsfw stuff locally...
But also this is a fortune 100 company that has the airgapped computer with the confidential stuff. Its big bucks.
I (somewhat) lie, all my experience working on rwkv.cpp does gain me knowledge and also contribute to the community. I'm just sort of sad that I don't have enough VRAM to finetune a bigger model to fit something like a chat format, or learn a certain vocabulary or whatever.
What it can be is a good starting point for the industry to get moving. Not sure if this runs SystemReady firmware or if this is using Microsoft's UEFI stack, but either way it could finally get vendorland moving.
But glass is considered premium.
The only other ridiculous argument that had an even worse effect on the net usability of phones, as well as the indistinguishable limited variety that we have today, is the ridiculous obsession with thinness. And then everyone puts a case on it anyway.
Thin, thin, thin, and a glass back on top of that. I'm not usually sympathetic to conspiracies but it sure seems like the interests of phone manufacturers ( especially one in particular) who want to sell a new throaway device every year were suspiciously well served by both of these absurd abitrary obsessions of the tech press.
People say "vote with your feet" and "just don't buy the stuff you don't like", but you can't exactly buy nothing when there are no options you like, because what if you need a laptop anyway? So you end up having to buy something "thin and light" which is a signal to the OEM that people want more thin and light even if all they wanted was a laptop.
particularly those who are well aware that you have two feet to work with while their side has paid influence wrangling a stampede of cattle in the other directiin.
Like the author mentions, it's not a dealbreaker, but is a calling-card of this particular machine's build/materials/specs not living up to its pricetag.
... but, why would I use such harsh rhetoric?
That's ecause the most important component of a laptop is not its CPU; it is the --==[[ keyboard ]]==--.
A laptop without a keyboard with decent key travel and tactile feedback simply deters you from using it. People who do not write much (code, documents, etc.) - can perhaps make do with point-and-click-oriented laptops. We cannot. That's why are currently condemned to choose between 10-year-old CPUs and I/O ports, but with decent keyboards; and fancy modern CPUs in laptops that are inconvenient to use.
Now look at this laptop's keyboard:
https://p3-ofp.static.pub/fes/cms/2022/03/03/ww9s3cycoxj6gbs...
they keys barely even protrude from the surrounding surface!
Please consider that most people don’t care about long key travel, and that some people such as myself actually strongly prefer short key travel as it reduces pain for me. Also, have you used this keyboard or are you judging it based on one zoomed out marketing image?
And debugging we do with our brains mostly :-)
Based on this: https://blog.rymcg.tech/blog/linux/thinkpad-x13s/ GPU support seems to have issues, which is a shame. That was written a few months ago, though.
I had a M2 MBP issued for work by my previous job and it really was excellent; performance and battery life. But I'd have a hard time giving up Linux, and I'd worry about installation of Linux on hardware like that always being second-class.
This is kind of surprising, because Windows for ARM has been around for _7 years_ (I'm ignoring ye olde Windows RT here, because everyone else did). I got an ARM Mac Mini a couple of months after they launched; at that point, while there was still a good bit of stuff with poor or no native support (most annoying: IntelliJ; don't think it got native support for about six months), native Chrome was already available.
I suppose the difference is that third parties don't see Windows for ARM as a serious product, but there's a definite chicken and egg problem there.
Does anyone know which laptops Devin is referring to?
I'm one of those odd guys who love big laptops (I've used 17” models for over a decade now) and I don't care about the weight at all. But I'd love it if I could trade some of those models' performance for more battery life (a reliable 8 hours would be sufficient), and they're never designed for that.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_...
What kind of person is writing that article? Sounds like someone who's identity is first and foremost a rich guy from the US.
I hope that's not the case... as most developers are not USers, and while they may make a decent living, I doubt most developers would consider blowing thousands of dollars on a Mac (regardless of whether they like it SW/HW-wise). And who buys Microsoft laptops? That's weird.
Yes, but this a english speaking forum, from a mainly US based incubator, so the audience is self-selecte... Nothing against dev from other part of the world.
> I doubt most developers would consider blowing thousands of dollars on a Mac
Mac are consistently the most selling laptop... so clearly someone is buying them.
> And who buys Microsoft laptops? That's weird.
Agree. Big mistake, but this one is on me :)
If I couldn't find a good Thinkpad, I would get a Surface.
Until then, I refuse to use a Mac, because I don't like the OS or the limited hardware choice.
The Linux limitation is totally fair, although kind of irrelevant here (as it doesn't run well on the Qualcomm chips either).
I think it's perfectly valid reason. At the end of the day a laptop is a tool, and your experience using the tool trumps any intrisic quality of said tool.
I can relate, the main reason i do not use Mac's as personal device ( i have had some issue to me in my professional life) is MacOS. It always existed in a sort of middle ground that doesn't suits my needs : Doesn't have the broad compatibility with windows (in my case gaming, CPU/GPU and tools like intel vtune) and it's a unix, but close to enough to linux where most of professional work revolves around (lack of virtualization, not elf format support, native toolings are different etc... etc...)
The hardware is amazing, the price is great, but the software is just not for me.
And it's sucks, because the landscape of high-end windows laptop is just plain embarrassing. I am currently driving a surface pro 9 : Garbage battery life, runs hot on anything but web browsing and worst of the all the screen (120 Hz minds you) have HORRIBLE ghosting.
The only saving grace of windows laptops right now is that if one is patient there are some sweet sweet discount deals to be had.
Seems like a fairly valid reason. I used Windows for the first time since early XP recently (in a VM; wanted to check that an interview question was doable in it without undue pain). I was just astonished at how bad it felt, and couldn't wait to shut down the VM. It's unsurprising that others have the same thing in the other direction.
This: I recently moved to Linux. I was happy on Windows, because with the right combination of plugins and programs it felt just right + I could get everything I wanted hardware-wise.
Last time I checked, this is not possible on Mac. You get a good battery life, but I don't care about that - I'd rather have a Zen3 AMD but I'm happy with my current laptop.
With Linux, I don't have to fight my OS to get everything the way I want it to be, I can get a nice 4k OLED touchscreen on my Laptop with an internal LTE/5G module so I don't have to carry a phone just for getting online, etc.
BTW I use arch (lol) and I think I'll stay - mostly thanks to Arch because before that I didn't like Linux due to Ubuntu questionable choices that made me prefer Windows before.
If you want to help to make 5G work, get in touch. I'd need to know if you have internal WWAN antennas- if not, you can add them. It's just about installing a M2 module. At the same time, you can replace the current 512G NVMe by a 2T like from Sabrent or WD SN730 (though the latter has some firmware issues when using ZFS due to the power states)
?
I just recently bought a laptop and when I was comparing benchmarks, I didn't see Apple anywhere near the top of the list for CPU single or multithreaded. Not that I remotely care about CPU speeds, my number 1 focus was VRAM. Made it an easy decision since you basically pick something with Nvidia and high VRAM.
Next gen AMD mobile is also looking very good. AMD 7000 series mobile is really nice, but battery life isn't quite there compared to Apple.
Probably wasn't normalized as perf per watt.
Of course, that is a marketing metric, not something to genuinely care.
Better battery life + less heat = more comfort.