Acer Aspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstream Linux Support

> Need more power? The new Macs are absolutely great. I'm eyeing Asahi Linux too. It seems it can't do USB-C video yet, which is how I've so far avoided having a KVM switch.

Unless something changed very recently, Asahi can’t do any external video on the Mac Books (only HDMI on the Mac Mini, and maybe not all variants thereof).

External video on Asahi Linux is the only thing keeping me from considering a Mac Book Pro purchase. I simply can’t stomach working without a 27” 4K monitor.

Can you imagine how awful things would be if the 80286 on the Microchannel bus had won?

This was the target for IBM OS/2, and they had little interest in the flat memory model of the 80386.

Maybe a typo?

AV1 is impressive.

I run pure linux all day long on my Chromebook. Linux mints XFCE edition actually. The chromebook was free, found in recycling. Battery had 5 cycles on it. Installing an libre efi firmware bios was the ticket! So easy, I’m surprised you haven’t figured out you can already do this. Screw Google’s horrid “official” ways. They’re all bad. See: https://mrchromebox.tech/

It's mostly a standard Xubuntu with full disk encryption (just in case the machine gets stolen while travelling) i3 might be even better. I use that at work, but was too lazy to configure it on this machine.

I have desnapped it though and download Firefox directly from Mozilla. There is no Chromium on it.

Edit: I know that it would choke on opening an ever growing number of Firefox tabs. I just close them. And I don't run the machine for more than a couple of hours before shutting it down. Don't use suspend at all.

Edit2: It uses swap. Don't remember whether that was the standard setup or whether I added it myself. Of course you cannot rely on swap for responsive operation, but it helps parking some unused data because the desktop/distro is not optimized at all. And it helps you to get over a tight situation when you forget to close something. When it slows down it's a nice reminder to do so.

For travel is use a 10" intel atom + 4G RAM convertible tablet with touch screen (Lenovo brand) that runs Void Linux + Gnome. If it had 2G of RAM i'd run xfce but that would harm the detached-keyboard use-case. Once it's past LUKS passphrase prompt in initramfs, i can use it with the touch-screen only for simple tasks. It's fine for use with a decent amount of tabs in firefox, reading mail in thunderbird and writing code in vim if i have to.

Setup ZRAM in Alpine and you'll be amazed.

> Older computers almost always use more electricity than newer ones

The differences are marginal; my 7 year old i5 really doesn't use that much more power than a modern i5, if it even uses more power in the first place (I don't have a good way to measure this, and with sleep states and whatnot you really need to measure this to be sure).

A few years ago I calculated how much impact it would be if everyone would run a 30W server at their home 24/7; I originally started doing that because someone said that "everyone should just self-host these things at their home", and I wanted to demonstrate that this would have a horrible environmental impact. And turned out my initial thoughts were wrong, and impact was so small that actually, it didn't matter, and I didn't even both posting my comment.

And even if there would be a difference, energy of manufacture tends to outweigh energy usage of usage. There's a long chain of mining, transport, etc. etc. behind all of that I didn't calculate this, but usually the energy differences really do need to be quite substantial to justify the energy usage of manufacture.

Maybe I was horribly wrong and made a mistake; I didn't re-do the calculations for this comment out of laziness. But I do strongly encourage anyone to actually calculate or look up what the impact is, because initial "it's bad for the environment"-feelings could very well be wrong, and no one is served if attention, money, and effort is spent in the wrong places.

In terms of reduction of usage of resources, using an already-existing computer is considered better than manufacturing new hardware. OECD suggests[0] embracing a circular economy to reduce production of waste and consumption of resources. Notably, in the province I reside, 98% of electricity is provided by renewable resources[1]. The electrical grid is already there, and the computer I already have is also already there. Generally speaking, no more resource extraction or pollution of the planet is necessary for me to continue on my computing activities with my existing hardware.

All I have time to write right now, but check out the concept of permacomputing and frugal computing... [2][3]

[0] https://www.oecd.org/environment/waste/OECD-G20-Towards-a-mo... (p.24)

[1] https://choose.bchydro.com/why-choose-bc/clean-energy

[2] http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html / https://permacomputing.net

[3] https://limited.systems/articles/frugal-computing/

>Older computers almost always use more electricity than newer ones, I don't see how this is a real thing.

The vast majority of energy needed for computers is in the manufacturing. As [1] shows, the embodied energy in laptops has stayed largely constant over the last decade. The best thing you can do for the environment is to keep using an old laptop instead of throwing it out and replacing it, even if the new laptop draws fewer watts from the wall.

[1] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stoppe...

No exact calculation about GBs, just a general gut feeling that current resource consumption in the industrialized world is completely unsustainable. With smarter usage only a fraction of resources is needed for still decent user experience.

> Older computers almost always use more electricity than newer ones, I don't see how this is a real thing.

This computer is not on 24/7, but only very limited hours. So manufacturing a new one would a relatively high share.

Energy is the reason why I wrote ARM would probably be even better. But the Atom is pretty good too. The machine is fanless and when it was new the battery lasted nearly 7 hours (not for watching videos of course). Now that it's pretty old and still on it's first battery it still lasts several hours. Enough to read some news and do some trip planning.

"insanely fast"

Benchmark please.

You know what? You can get a new laptop with the latest i3 that is way faster than a 4 year old i7 for a little more than that, and it comes with a warranty. Yes, warranty is actually useful for many people. And most Windows laptops are worth little after 3 years, so this $300 laptop probably is only good for donations after a few more years.

(If you have any questions, check out reviews, benchmarks and eBay. I speak from my own experience.)

2GB of RAM are perfectly usable with ZRAM and UBlock Origin.

Google is a major lead for destroying the planet.

Ads waste incredible resources at the edge and in the cloud. 99% completely useless because people just hate them. And the remaining less than 1% even more harmful, manipulating people to buy nonsense products nobody needs.

So yes I occasionally watch a Youtube video if it seems really useful. But that's not a tab I would keep open a second longer than absolutely needed.

I invest significant resources in my desktop. But my laptops? For the last 5 years or so I've used exclusively pre-owned chromebooks, cost about 50 dollars on mercari. Flash aftermarket firmware, install linux, and I'm in business. Its usually a celeron with 4 gb of ram, although my first was 2 gb. They're plenty snappy. Youtube loads pretty much instantly. Playing actual real games is probably a step too far, but as a second screen to just have and use around the house there isn't really any compromise.

It's not about money. It's about using the planet in a responsible way. Unfortunately ruining the planet and harming many of its inhabitants is very cheap for many in industrialized countries.

>You can use lower grade hardware than that. But how is the user experience?

It depends on the software. When the developers are targeting the "average user", then everyone who uses hardware that's significantly older than average will be punished accordingly. This doesn't mean it's actually hard to support that old hardware, it just means that performance isn't a priority.

If everyone used old hardware for longer, then the software would support old hardware better.

Also, latency has been going up over time rather than down: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

This is more of a social problem than a technical one.

The issue is more about people changing their devices too often: I remember from years ago (so possibly outdated) that the average person changes smartphone every two years and laptop every 3/4 years. What OP is saying is that most people could totally work with an older laptop that doesn't have 16GB+ of RAM. Especially since most people are using cloud services anyway.

> time to move beyond POSIX clones.

Not when android manufacturers/google refuse to give me the type of control that open posix systems provide. Android is a useless hostle system for people like me (and it's not because of improved security).

> DEX makes a more modern OS

It tries, but between things like Firefox for Android not supporting hotkeys and chrome for Android not supporting middleclick, it seems like every typical Android app has some type of resistance to desktop usability in addition to their regular anti-user designs.

Running linux mint on 4th generation i5 with 4GB RAM worked ok but 8GB was really more comfortable (as in never worry about RAM no more) and you can easily get some for cheap so it's definitely a quick easy win.

But the dramatic speed difference ? HDD to SSD. That one upgrade allowed to be a dev on that old machine for three more years, until the motherboard died last year, RIP. I got almost 10 years out of that hardware with two cheap and easy upgrades. Nice.

On the other hand I don't recommend hardware older that 2013 as you get in performances that are really not comfortable or capped upgrade :

That one Late 2007 Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook was usable but Linux was a pain to install on, RAM was capped at 4GB and it was not comfortable performance wise. Cheaper hardware for the same era is barely usable for casual tasks.

Another thing I didn't mention with the 4th generation i5 laptop is that the plastics are always the first thing that break and it's a bit of a pain to have to replace it although it's cheap. Went with Framework 12th generation now and I am definitely intending to keep 10 years too. It feels much more sturdy, it's very nice. You just need a nice physical shell with upgradeable parts imho.

>It's like a car that's advertised as a general-purpose car that can only drive 80km/h.

Trying to get the analogy: it can 'only' do 80, or there are lower speeds possible and 80 is the max? I wouldn't mind a car like that...to and from work at the moment the most i need is about 45 tops.

> not practical in a lot of office/productivity scenarios

Most of them come with a web version, use that, it's what I do and never have any problems. And if a company only provides an Electron app with no web version the choice of Electron makes no sense and their product should be considered a toy, not a tool.

Interestingly, Qualcomm was shipping its ARM-based/Windows laptop chips prior to Apple's intro of the M1 Macbook. But they have failed to make a dent in the market. I think having something that amounts to ~parity in performance is not good enough to help lure customers to a new ISA. Like the M1, you have to give customers a really great story about switching.

> The M1 came out in 2020?

... but i bet it had been in development for 5+ years before that. Not to mention it's an iteration of the earlier Apple phone chips.

> ARM support is part of the puzzle but the architecture lags so badly.

One thing to note about this laptop is the storage is eMMC. Even whatever's in the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi only has one pcie lane, and they didn't bother including a M.2 nvme slot for storage?

They're all still in the phone with crap storage mindset. It's not so relevant how fast your CPU is (and it's probably reasonably fast) if the software runs off storage that's slower and has more latency than sata...

I'm not seeing Qualcomm upstream support for their old phone/tablet SoC's to the kernel mainline, that work is still being done by the pmOS folks and other community members. New phones will probably benefit more.

Note that HDMI out supposedly works on the pro, so the missing functionality is just the microphone, touchid, and thunderbolt/usb4. (Unless you have a usb3 display or really like dongles).

With it being modular there's always the potential for CPU upgrades in the future. But yes, it's much less performant than a modern x86 or Apple Silicon device. Performance isn't the primary goal, though admittedly it would be nice.

This will of course never happen but imagine if there were an M1 CPU module for it.

Qualcomm is maybe more realistic but from what I've heard it seems like they won't even talk to you if you're not ordering in huge quantities.

JH7110 has the best upstream support among Linux capable RISC-V SoCs.

Any PineTab-V specific hardware, however, might add extra complication.

Out of the box is just not a thing yet.

Not really and misunderstanding what is meant for the sake of a pun. For the wording used in the article, your case is usually stuck at "complete" but very unpolished. E.g. all ports, sound, power etc. will work (fingerprint probably not), but sound might not be great, sleep might still use too much power, mic quality is bad,... (source: also using linux for 20 years).

For the remaining polish, that is not surprising. That is also usually not the case with windows itself but rather additional work by the manufacturer. E.g. a few years ago I bought some lenovo laptop without windows. Installed a fresh copy of windows and sound, color profiles, mic quality etc. are decidedly unpolished out of the box, unknown devices in the device manager, ... . Spending some time to get all this from lenovo then fixed these issues, but again that was not done by windows. So I would also not have high expectations of polish for windows on chromebooks or "asahi windows".

There are some things that simply do not work under Linux because of lack of driver support. An example is fingerprint readers. I agree that most x86 laptops are usable under Linux.

i believe the point being made is: all systems need a lot of work, with x86-as-the-norm being the real oddity

Grammar police in the room, yo!

being strangled is indeed bad for life

It is.

Actually it seems that an open-source driver for the GPU of RK3588 will be soon available:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Panthor-DRM-Newer-Mali

Until then, the binary libraries provided by Arm can be used.

RK3588 has 4 lanes of PCIe 3 and a variable number of PCIe 2 lanes (variable because they share pins with other interfaces).

Most boards with RK3588 use the 4 PCIe 3 lanes for an SSD M.2 socket.

A carrier for 4 SSDs could use a more expensive PCIe switch for high performance, or it could split the 4 lanes to the sockets for low cost.

The main competitor of RK3588, Intel N100, is claimed to have up to 9 PCIe 3 lanes.

Nevertheless, I believe that they must share pins with other interfaces, because all the computers that I have seen with Intel Alder Lake N are starved for PCIe lanes and in none of them the M.2 socket uses 4 lanes, but usually only 2, or even only 1, so their SSDs have reduced speed, lower than in most RK3588 computers (but the N100 Gracemont cores are significantly faster than the Cortex-A76 cores of RK3588).

The RK3588 does have PCIe.