Ask HN: How has your experience been with a Snapdragon-based laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How has your experience been with a Snapdragon-based laptop?

49 pointsclosetkantian30 comments

I'm in the market for a new laptop, and I'm wondering if people have run into any hiccups in terms of app support.

Not technically a snapdragon laptop, but I use my S24 with Samsung Dex and Lapdock as my laptop. Its actually pretty good as far as usability. Hardware wise, the touchpad is pretty shit, but I use a Trackball mouse anyways and I can easily upgrade if a better version comes out since price is cheap.

There are some things that dont work, namely ML stuff with pytorch, but for everything else, Termux is pretty complete, and you can run Vscode or Jupyter Lab in the browser for dev.

I'm always curious about developers who are able to use such (no offense) limited devices. Not limited in the performance sense, but limited in the capability sense.

Does it not bother you that there are things you cannot do, and workarounds you need to have (e.g. running your text editor in a web browser)? What is the advantage to you over a normal laptop?

What do you mean? I use DEX on S20 with Termux which is basically Linux with all the normal package manager stuff. Can run PostgreSQL, alpine docker files, PocketBase, Portainer, whatever.

There are nice editos too as well if you look around.

With 6GB of RAM it can't run LLMs beyond Tiny Llama, but it's def usable.

I am writing this from a Chromebook with an 8th gen Core i3 CPU. I bought it used for around $50. It has a rather good Linux container which can run even graphical applications. This is not really that limited anymore other than using Chrome instead of a proper browser (Firefox :P). I previously used a quite slow Chromebook which I bought new for around $100. It also had a Linux container, but it was more of a beta feeling and it hardly could run graphical applications.

What is great about those devices is that they are almost perfect thin clients. I also have a big desktop machine running Linux. I remote a lot to it, but with this newer Chromebook it is often enough to do things on itself alone. The biggest perks for me is that they are cheap (easily replaceable), lightweight and have a very long battery life, the keyboard quality and other things are also good. On this newer Chromebook I even wrote most of my thesis for a geographical faculty and even did maps with QGIS.

I am living mostly in a Linux terminal, so with the mentioned old Chromebook I sshed a lot more. I use Zerotier and at times I leave my desktop on and remote to it even on the run with phone tethering.

You don't need to run your text editor in a web browser, and you can do a lot of stuff, just not, like, run ML models.

People use RasPis as servers and PCs all the time, and a top-end android phone can often do more.

(neo)vim and emacs both work in termux!

I have full Node.js, Python, Golang and VS Code with 50 extensions on my phone - and a lot of other stuff from Nixpkgs (using Nix on Droid). Yeah it's in a browser using openvscode-server, but I added it as a PWA app and on DeX that looks just like a normal desktop app.

The phone has 8 cores, 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB disk, it's better than what I had few years ago as a desktop computer.

The advantage is that I don't need a personal laptop - I have only the one from work, and that's the 16" Macbook Pro - I don't travel with that; it's easier to pack my USB-C to HDMI cable and the BT keyboard and mouse, also I don't really care if that is stolen or broken. At the destination I simply abuse any random TV as needed. All my important data is on pCloud plus some physical backups on my home NAS.

Now I really wonder if I could run Kubernetes on the phone...

>What is the advantage to you over a normal laptop?

Lighter weight, cheaper, smaller form factor, not having to worry about syncing storage or things like messages across apps. Also basically a spare power bank for the phone.

>Does it not bother you that there are things you cannot do,

Not really, because I can always SSH to my home computer if I need to have a full linux environment. The case for this is very rare though, and half the time its because I don't want to spend the time compiling stuff from scratch on the phone.

I purchased the Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon Elite and 64GB ram. The performance seems pretty decent, even while using Visual Studio on it and a few accompanying apps/tools. Battery lasts a decent amount, but nothing close to even 10 hours if you're doing work. There are surprisingly decent amount of apps that run on ARM now, and the x86 ones also run decently. The biggest issue I've had is the sleep - it drains significantly more battery than an MBP, and after a while it seems to go into hibernate which takes a very long time to reboot back into windows (30s-60s+). It's just completely inefficient at handling sleep still. The last issue is battery time when you are not doing lightweight browsing - the battery tends to go down a lot quicker.

Charging is pretty slow, wish it could be faster via USB-C, but that's a design issue, not necessarily related to snapdragon.

I really wanted to love it - but it's more of an expensive toy because of the battery/sleep. My MBP with the M2 Max still handles sleep infinitely better, and battery life is also significantly better when actually doing development on it. Im not a fan at all of MacOS, and I tend to RDP into my home machine most of the time, but even with that, I'd chose the MacBook for now over the ARM windows laptop.

I've had a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (32gb) for 3 months now, and my experience with it has been quite good. Mostly been using it for light development, browsing, media, etc.

Installing most software on Windows wasn't a big problem, just make sure it's an arm64 process in the task manager and you're good. I would highly recommend to make a list of all programs you use and make sure they have arm64 support (not just arm, that's 32bit) before you buy a Snapdragon laptop. VLC was the only problem I encountered, it only had a nightly version that was too unstable. I didn't find a lot of alternatives for media players except for Windows media player (yes that still exists).

I was mostly impressed with how well WSL2 ran on it. I have been running it for years and it works just as well for the Snapdragon laptops. Here too, most software I needed had arm64 binaries, especially from apt. I just couldn't use Homebrew as I used to, so it took slightly longer to install things (brew is supported for Linux but only on x86).

It really depends on your needs off course, if you're into the WSL + VS Code ecosystem for things like Python, Go, Rust development, I would highly recommend it. Don't expect to do any heavy development work with LLMs though, but not many machines are even capable of that anyway (x86 or not).

I knew what I was getting into buying this pc and being an early adopter wasn't going to be easy. But I'm surprised with how little issues I encountered in the end and that I can do pretty much everything I used to do before that. And in case I really can't run an app I always have an x86 desktop to fall back on.

So you're not able to do VLC via emulation?

Since i installed termux on android, its been 8 years, i never opened my laptop or pc, they are just sitting on desk all dusted Android with 4gb ram and termux, is way faster then my windows laptop, Whether hosting, deploying servers, arsenal of editors and programming ide/environments, and all linux utilities, and in pocket

With proot you can instal full fledged headless distro accesible via ssh or vnc

Host your own media server

Control your smart tvs and Iot devices Combined with android browsers with devtools support + termux + adb it gives full fledged web development environment

Connect harddisk via otg and yu have full desktop kind of rasp Pi but better faster with side by side android os

With DEX SUpport connect monitor + keyboard + mouse

ITS ONE HELL OF PORTABLE WORKSTATION With ROOT its capabilities are beyound imaginations

Hell ITS 1000times better than any laptop,

You must have had some weak computers then because I cannot imagine that being true with any modern and/or powerful system.

Also depends on use cases. Everyone's is different. I could probably run all the code that's on one of my servers (dozens of different applications that server hundreds of users) off a modern android phone.

People use RasPis as servers and PCs all the time, and a top-end android phone can often do more.

You don't specify operating system. It would have a strong bearing upon your experience.

I have a 8-core ARM ChromeBook and it performs as well as a M1 MacBookAir for 20% of the price. When on the road, the ChromeBook suffices for my needs. For development work I prefer my beefy desktop system with 3 LCDs.

Which Chromebook is that? Are there some good relatively high-performance ARM ones that aren't nearly like $1000?

No, of course not. An M2 MacBook Air is £1k. For £200 you can get a shitty N100 Chromebook which is going to be nowhere near an M2.

I assume he's actually talking about something like the Acer Spin 513 which has an 8-core ARM chip but that is over £400. It apparently has a multicore geekbench score of around 4k compared the the M2 MacBook Air's 10k. So the performance scales with the price.

Still that does seem like quite good value if you are willing to wait twice as long for your compiles...

Or if you use some kind of web-based IDE or remote gateway: you compromise little.

Except that you have to have a network connection to be able to work. Which has bitten me a couple of times (on trains and planes, where I have a lot of free time to do something).

I just bought a much older Acer c7 Chromebook (intel silicon) to install native Linux as an experiment, it's been fun. I wonder do the modern ones allow this or are they more locked down? I'd love to have an ARM based Linux machine without remortgaging my house

The difficulty with ARM Chromebooks is firmware/booting and driver support. With x86 models you can generally just flask mrchromebox's UEFI firmware and you're set, but ARM doesn't really have an equivalent (yet?). I'd suggest starting from https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:ChromeOS to find something well-supported.

Now that said - one of my main computers is an ARM ex-Chromebook running postmarketos that cost $99 new, so it absolutely can works:) You just have to pick hardware that's had its quirks ironed over.

Which specific one did you go for?

I've got a https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Flex_3_Chr... ... For the record, I don't recommend this exact model for most people. Audio never worked (for some weird reason that probably boils down to alsa settings) and the touchscreen isn't working right now. Weirdly this doesn't matter for my uses, but obviously that's not great. If I was buying one today I'd skim the wiki to find something that lists everything supported and maybe ask in Matrix if anyone can confirm.

here's the link: https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/lenovo-ideapad-slim-3-14-...

I did try the Linux environment and it isn't too bad. But I don't do development on the ChromeBook. I use a desktop for that. Personally, I don't find working in noisy environments feasible. Even when I was doing my PhD I had a private office.

I'd be interested in a Lenovo X1 Nano based on ARM.

The existing Nano is already less than one kilogram (between 700 and 800 grams), so small, thin and light. With additional battery life due to a low-energy CPU, this could be a great machine for the road, especially for management.

i know it's only been 5 hours, but the lack of comments about any Snapdragon X Elite laptop so far makes it pretty clear.... people aren't buying these things...

they're starting to come down in price a bit, i also would like to pick up a thinkpad version for < 5 bills, but they're not there yet, also i've heard very little about the linux support on them

Perhaps this is the wrong forum to ask? At least in general there's a decent number of conversations on snapdragon in the surface subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/search/?q=snapdragon&cId=57...

I would take those posts with a grain of salt. Every time there’s a post about Snapdragon, there’s at least a few comments saying how great they are and others trashing Intel. It smells more like an astroturf campaign than legitimate praise.

I don’t doubt that they’re good enough for typical user tasks like browsing and office, but I think the HN crowd would be looking for a deeper understanding as it relates to development tools, etc.

"So good, I reviewed it twice"?

I wrote about the Thinkpad X13S Gen 2. It's an odd little beast. It has strengths and weaknesses.

Part 1:

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

A modern RISC computer trying desperately to pretend it's just another PC

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/lenovo_thinkpad_x13s_...

Part 2:

Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there

Armbian 23.08 is out, and adds preliminary support for this ultralight Snapdragon laptop

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad...

Now there's a T series version -- the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 -- and I am somewhat tempted.

I have a Surface Laptop 7 with 32GB RAM (the Costco edition).

Software-wise as a user, no complaints. All the software I use (90% MS stack) works perfectly.

Even as a developer in the Windows space I have 0 complaints.

Moving to WSL, even that works fine, as long as the software you can get is ARM64 (as your WSL layer doesn't have an emulator). And there you run into brew not supporting ARM64 for Linux... yet.

In terms of hardware, I'm super happy. The fan barely runs. The battery life is amazing. The charging port is MS' version of Magsafe, and adds safety.

The screen is not bad, but not good either. I wish it was brighter and had a higher resolution.

I've got an original Thinkpad X13s that I' picked up about a year and a half ago, used, for a travel laptop. It's hard to hate in the same way that M-series MacBooks are now. The battery life is great, the performance is good, and for what I use it for, the compatibility hasn't been an issue. Firefox works great and I can use WSL with an ARM linux and run IntelliJ inside of that.

I wouldn't move to a Windows/ARM full-time just yet, but, it's not bad.

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