P.s. I know about asahi, but from a quick glance, it doesn't look like all the driver functionality is there yet (although, I must say, their rate of progress has been awe inspiring).
https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-...
Though their latest CPU seems to be Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3? And it hasn't ben updated for 1.5+ years. It seems to perform at around 60-70% of M1 which I guess is not that terrible.
But I'm not sure their battery life is really that exceptional? The ThinkPad X13s doesn't seem to last that much longer than laptops with low-power AMD CPUs (which are both much faster and should have way less driver and software issues, e.g. even laptops with something as old as 5700U supposedly have comparable battery life according to some benchmarks)
I'm not aware of a non-Apple ARM laptop that works better than an M1 with Asahi.
As early as the Toshiba AC100 there were usable ARM laptops on Linux. Nowadays, you can spend $99 and get a fully-supported ARM Pinebook if you fancy. Or check out the MNT Reform, ClockworkPi systems, Snapdragon laptops, Nintendo Switch, the list goes on. There are dozens of better-supported mobile ARM platforms, if you specifically want Linux on ARM.
The 13-year old AC100 and Pinebook don't meet the ops' specs of half the performance of the M1 and great battery life. Nor would any of the other examples you list.
The MNT Reform looks neat, but I doubt the performance and battery will meet OP's specs. Nonetheless, pretty neat.
The Nintendo Switch isn't a laptop.
For comparison one of my other (budget) laptops with Ryzen 4700u gives me over 6 hours of battery life with light usage (including browsing the internet), but I still get around 4 hours out of it when I keep compiling the kernel over and over again.
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinebook-pro/
They're only about US$200, so depending on your budget it might be a useful experiment. :)
I just googled that and found out there is such a thing branded WaveShare, seeming pretty good, but it's discontinued. That's sad, I would be buying it straight away but I couldn't even find a used thing on eBay.
It's surprising that there are few actual suggestions here, so I guess we're not quite there yet, at least as far as affordable mainstream options go? Props to Lenovo and others for trying, though.
I recall needing something similar a few years ago and just opting for an x86 netbook with an underpowered Celeron, something like this: https://techbite.eu/en/laptopy/laptop-zin-3-14-1 (probably just a rebrand of something else)
The battery life was great and it was dirt cheap, which I'd love to have with ARM and perhaps more RAM.
That particular model was just an example (build quality shows the budget segment and Wi-Fi drivers started working in Linux distros out of the box some time after the release), but I hope we'll have more budget computing options I'm the future! Maybe even RISC-V some day.
A cursory glance at geekbench shows that you can get around 50% the performance of a 2020 Macbook Air M1, if you get the upgraded CPU option.[2][3] I have no idea how useful those benchmarks are, though.
[1] https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16291496 [3] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2504172
Other than that, I think your choice is generally between consumer-focused ARM-based Chromebooks with MT Kompanio 1380 like Acer Spin 530 on on hand, or enthusiast devices like MNT and Pinebook on the other.
https://liliputing.com is worth keeping an eye on.
- Thinkpad X13s (barely works Ubuntu/Armbian)
- Microsoft Surface Laptop (barely works Fedora)
- Macbook Air (works Arch, Fedora, Debian)
Macbook Air M1 will provide you with 3x CPU power and will have the best drivers and largest community.
If you want 0.5x M1, you’re already out of options. The closest you get is 0.33x M1 that barely works.
Second off, there is no reason to list the Thinkpad X13s as "barely works". It had better power-management and GPU drivers than Asahi on day-one. The same probably goes for the Surface Laptop, if it's also got a Snapdragon GPU.
Thirdly, according to Geekbench (and every resource I could find), the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 exceeds 50% of the M1's performance without a struggle:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2504172
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2490755
Making matters worse, the Snapdragon chip only maxes out at 9w, whereas Apple's chip will happily go to 30-40w during regular use. So, not only do you get better than the .5x M1, you get it with better battery life too!
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad...
The CPU can’t do virtualization. M1 can, but can’t do nested virtualization.
I dunno about surface.
Linux on M1 is not ready for day to day usage for a user who wants everything to work.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad...
As of now it barely works. The experience is arguably worse than on Mac M1. But it’s improving fast.
The trackpad is terrible though.
You can get very good battery life with a modern "windows" (i.e non-mac) laptop with a bigger battery, and running a very lightweight distro like bunsenlabs (an optionally tweaking some CPU throttling parameters). In standby the battery should last close to a full day. With modern fast charging over USB-C, this works very well.
You can also just get a modern Android Tablet with good battery life, and use a bluetooth keyboard + mouse with something like Termux on the backend. You can run vscode web gui for an IDE.
I think most of the drivers have been implemented but could not talk of personal experience (have the yoga c630 and drivers requires firmware files that need to be extracted from windows, my current experince is useable but subpar )
Apple users have to switch to ARM because that's what Apple decided to use, but in PC-land you can get more performance out of a new ryzen for less money.
You can rent an ARM VM for the odd occasion you absolutely need an ARM.
> Why arm? I want exceptional battery life.
(there are PC laptops with 16-20 battery life, but just like with macs that number goes down significantly when you start using it for real)
This isn't some hypothetical debate about what "the average person" needs to determine how important a given aspect is.
It's one specific person who wants a specific thing. You don't need to question how often they need something - they've told you a specific thing they want and the reason.
The "real world" tests from Laptop Mag suggest M2-series Macs have 16-18 hours of battery life doing exactly what OP asked for: browsing (and light coding). Of the 10 laptops they tested, 7 were ARM based, and the "best" non-ARM was #6 in terms of battery life, the other two were #9 and #10.
Regardless of whether you want/like Macs specifically, I think arguing against the common wisdom that modern Arm devices are typically get better battery life than x86 competitors is kind of bizarre. It's like arguing that 64bit was a mistake or the Internet is just a fad.
For example, were laptops completely useless before 2020, when the best you could get out of them was 12 hours?
How often in your life are you stuck on a 18 hours flight without AC power?
OP mentioned light coding on Linux. What battery life would M2 achieve when running Docker in a VM?
Does Ashahi Linux reach anywhere near the 16 hrs battery of macs? Apple delibertly limited Windows battery on Intel macs, do you think they would treat Linux differently.
And so on...
I can't believe I'm having to explain this concept to you, but no, they weren't completely useless. They were less convenient. That's what battery life gives you: convenience. I'm still somewhat flabbergasted that this concept needs to be explained.
> How often in your life are you stuck on a 18 hours flight without AC power?
Why does it have to be a flight? I occasionally spent all day working from a café around 2010 because my apartment had no AC. I was lucky enough to have somewhere close to home that both (a) had AC power outlets near a quiet table and (b) didn't mind me using it. Having such long life at "basic usage" levels means you're more likely to get "all day" life at higher levels of activity.
Right now I work from home (using a desktop, which gasp has an Arm CPU in it) almost exclusively, but I have a UPS with 40kg (that's 88lbs) of batteries, because the power here is ridiculously unreliable - it's sometimes out for 5 hours or more.
Some people like to use their laptop outside in a park or what have you. I don't know if you've been to a park lately but most of them don't have AC outlets.
You seem to have some weird obsession that a long battery runtime is somehow unnecessary, and that OP should just settle for an x86 laptop and the almost-guaranteed significantly shorter runtime that comes with it.
> OP mentioned light coding on Linux. What battery life would M2 achieve when running Docker in a VM?
Why would OP need a VM or Docker? They want to run Linux natively, they specifically don't want to run MacOS, they just like the performance/battery life of the Mac hardware.
> Does Ashahi Linux reach anywhere near the 16 hrs battery of macs? Apple delibertly limited Windows battery on Intel macs, do you think they would treat Linux differently.
I have no idea about the former, and I don't even know what you're talking about with the latter - but both points are kind of moot in this discussion, maybe you missed it so far: OP DOES NOT WANT A MAC. Macs are only referenced as a comparison for performance and proof of long battery life afforded by Arm vs Intel, in a commercially available product.
And look! Their Mali GPU even ships with compliant OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Now that's rapid progress.
With Power Profiles in Gnome set to "Power Saver" you'll easily last more than a day. Standby power is excellent.
LG has other, smaller models as well, but I think they come with smaller batteries that aren't quite as good a balance of power and weight.