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Comment by heywire | Hacker News Reader

What I want to know…can it run Linux? And can it run Linux better than a M3 MBA?

I don’t want Windows. I don’t want MacOS. I want a thin, efficient, fast, light, affordable replacement for my aging Latitude 7370 running Linux.

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I believe there's some work done by Qualcomm developers on Linux, and they even have some marketing site about mainlining Linux support here[1].

Linux 6.10 has some drivers for hardware on the Snapdragon X Elite platform[2].

That said, Linux support does not come down to just SoC support. Each device using the Snapdragon platform will need support from manufacturers or volunteers to get Linux running on them, as they'll need DeviceTrees written for them, drivers for peripherals and whatnot.

[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-eDP-DP-X-Elite

It would be nice to be able to purchase a Linux laptop with proper power management. I haven’t used a Linux laptop in a long time, but when I did, I found it didn’t manage different power modes well at all. I feel that’s the main drawback to a Linux laptop, so if arm chips fixed that it would be awesome.

My Latitude 7370 is just about perfect. With gnome power profiles, I can easily switch between power saver, balanced, and performance, suspend/resume works fine. All peripherals work out of the box. It has a crisp 3200x1800 touchscreen that works great under Gnome. It is pretty much my perfect Linux laptop. I only wish the battery life was better, and that it had a more powerful CPU. It is fanless, so it throttles pretty quickly under load.

I ran some tests, and completely idle at 30% brightness I can get 7h under Linux and 8h under Windows, so Linux still has some room for improvement. But as someone who uses Windows at work, there is no way I could go back to that personally. Not unless they released an open source version completely cleaned of crapware and bloat. The Enterprise / IOT versions are the closest I’ve come to that.

This is one of the main reasons I use Pop! on my Thinkpad. Their power management works great out of the box, I get three times the battery life compared to Win 10. Suspend often doesn't work properly, but to me, that's a minor issue, likely hw related.

> What I want to know…can it run Linux? And can it run Linux better than a M3 MBA?

And if it runs Linux, how much of the impressive battery optimizations am I going to sacrifice?

Keep in mind that sometimes the answer is negative; Linux sometimes outperforms Windows on the same hardware.

With official vendor support: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite

Linux doesn’t run on any M3 Mac at all.

Touché. I was thinking Asahi / M1.

Why would you be so obsessive about thin and light? Making hardware thin and light costs money and performance.

Thin and light is better for portability, if I didn't care about portability I'd just use my far more powerful desktop.

Because the point of a laptop is to be portable? And a large chunk of that is being small and light? I could haul my full desktop and monitors around with me, but it's not worth the tradeoff. If I can get a computer that does 70% of what my desktop can do at a tenth of the weight and size, that's worth the money.

IMO for many people a laptop means highly portable, wire free 'desktop' computing experience that you can't get on a tablet. Therefore the comparison for mobility is with a tablet and not a powerful Windows laptop.

Plus many people working in tech have specific systems for specific tasks; I use a spec'ed up Windows laptop for heavy lifting and games, and an M1 Air as my main computer.

But at the same time, many people also asks for performance improvements, and sometimes extra few USB A ports too. Plenty people makes hyperbolic claims such as which Apple Mx CPUs has x times more computation than which NVIDIA GPUs, superficially focusing on raw CPU performances.

I know deep down that thinnest laptops with brightest displays sells the most in reality, marketing wise, but it just sounds a bit hypocritical to me.

For ultraportables I think people just want performance to be “good enough” while also not getting hot or spinning up a fan. The M1 Air struck this balance very well – it was no speed demon but wasn’t pokey either, and battery life didn’t suffer for it.

This was in stark contrast to contemporaries where any semblance of decent battery life required low power mode, which made them dog slow. Even today this is something that x86 laptops with current chips struggle with… there are a handful of x86 ultraportables that can get M1 MBA like battery life, but they have larger batteries than the MBA had and still need low power mode to pull it off reliably.

That’s where a lot of the hype around “M-series SoC is capable of X performance” is rooted. It’s not the performance in and of itself, but the perf per watt, which allows that performance without also turning the laptop into a furnace/jet or destroying battery life.

Super critical for those that travel a lot, whether for work or personal needs. I've lugged some boat anchors around; having extra space for the necessities, or just being able to work in economy class on a long flight, are premiums I'm willing to pay for.

I have both a Latitude 7370 for personal use and a Precision 3520 for work. Lugging that Precision around is a pain in the butt. It is big and bulky, noisy and hot. That said, as my eyes continue to age, the 13” screen of my Latitude does seem smaller than it once was, though the crispness of the 3200x1800 is much better than the grainy 1080p in the Precision. And I do miss the number pad sometimes. My perfect form factor these days would probably be a 14-15” in a similar profile as my Latitude (it is essentially a poor man’s XPS 13).

Correction: my work laptop is a Precision 3571 (used to have a 3520).

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