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I'm still waiting for the apple laptop killer (a 12h+ laptop with plain Ubuntu) but it's still brittle as fuck. I'm so frustrated by the current state of the mobile computing space. I have to have an Apple locked down device, which I hate, just because I want proper battery life.

A aarch64 Ubuntu vm inside MacOS runs faster and lasts more time than a booted up Ubuntu on arm in these devices. This is how far behind these things are.

and what bums me the most is that it's all about software. The hardware is great, but software on Snapdragon is taking a lot of time to catch up and it screams M$ lobby to me

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Pretty sure there are plenty of traditional x86 Linux laptops that have north of 12h battery life. System76 comes to mind (mandatory "System76 is just a Clevo wrapper" comment).

My AMD Framework 13 running Fedora (an officially supported option: https://frame.work/linux ) also gets around that amount of battery life. And can run games surprisingly well.

  My AMD Framework 13 running Fedora (an officially supported option: https://frame.work/linux ) also gets around that amount of battery life. And can run games surprisingly well.

Macs don't throttle when you unplug it. All AMD laptops do.

Even when plugged in, AMD laptops are quite a bit slower than Macs. When unplugged, it's not even close.

That puts you at just over 5W average on a 61whr battery. I find that very hard to believe. 5W is achievable if you drastically limit the CPU governor, physically disable the mic/camera, using a chart-topping power-efficient SSD, all while actually doing nothing. Just a single YouTube video in a single firefox tab will bring you up to at least 10W.

> Just a single YouTube video in a single firefox tab will bring you up to at least 10W.

10W for video playback is a lot. 5w average for light workloads is not unrealistic... I think your perception of power consumption is a number of years out of date at this point.

After all, Apple claims 18 hours from a 54watt-hour battery - you really think nobody else can get within 2x of that?

Does it really? I had an AMD framework at one point, and I seem to remember 5 hour use times on battery, max.

Lenovo X1 Carbon g13 gets you close to 12h. Also similar results for other laptops using the same CPU, such as Asus Zenbook S14.

It's not "just a Clevo wrapper."

Clevo is their ODM. They work with Clevo to put together a laptop, and Clevo gets the right to sell a Windows variant. Their version differs, particularly in firmware but also possibly in chips.

But do they weigh 3 lbs at the same time?

Laptops with Intel Lunar Lake (i.e. 258V) CPUs get upwards of 12 hours easily, often in 15-18 hour range depending on the battery size. Just a quick search reveals for example Dell XPS 13 9350 (Core Ultra 7 258V) is Ubuntu certified [1], weighs 2.6 pounds, and has long battery life (17-18 hours video streaming on Windows).

[1] https://ubuntu.com/certified/202407-34214

Lunar Lake laptops throttle a lot when unplugged. They run benchmarks plugged in and in maximum performance mode but battery benchmarks in max battery mode.

True, but the throttled performance on battery is enough for office work / coding / browsing workloads. Is it matching Apple silicon, probably not. Is Linux matching MacOS on SW/HW optimization? Probably not either.

Microsoft has definitely put a lot of work into the arm surface laptops. I'm having a good time using a surface 15 inch. I picked the lowest spec model, only 16 GM ram and 256 GB drive. But I use it like a terminal: I run vscode server on either my desktop or a VM, and the vscode client on the laptop. So the actual compiling and I think also the LSP is running remotely, but I still have a responsive editor on the client. The result is phenomenal battery life, 16 hours if not more. It also has the side effect that any build artifacts are produced directly on the server, no more uploading multi-gigabyte containers over my home Internet to the cloud. But of course, it assumes 24/7 internet connection.

I would appreciate a native Linux arm laptop, but this setup works for me in the meantime.

> I'm still waiting for the apple laptop killer (a 12h+ laptop with plain Ubuntu) but it's still brittle as fuck.

Try Intel's Lunar Lake. My Zenbook 14S (S is important here!) does 12h+ on VS Code, browser & meetings (but compilation is remote). The screen is better than on Macbooks (it's high-res OLED), overall build is good. You probably won't be able to run Ubuntu LTS without installing latest kernel, but regular version should do just fine.

If you don't like ASUS, you can also try Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13. It's a bit on the smaller side and costs twice as much, but it's a pretty neat device.

Oh that's nice hardware for the price. I wonder if ChromeOS Flex installs as easily.

In an alternate universe my hope was AMD builds a killer mobile/embedded Arm APU instead of the failed Opteron A series. Of course this would never happen because what software would run on it? Apple on the other hand steers the entire ship so they had the ability to produce the entire stack. Even MS could not build an Arm ecosystem.

> I have to have an Apple locked down device, which I hate, just because I want proper battery life.

Chicken and egg. The Linux vendors don't have the power to drive ODMs nearly as much as Apple because everyone keeps buying Windows and slapping Linux on it (then complaining online when they have to be the systems integrator themselves, fixing the inevitable razor cuts)

We learned one simple lesson, the past 10 years: if you want good ARM support, it has to come from the vendor. Nobody else can reverse-engineer devicetrees or GPU drivers with a remotely comparable release cadence. Linux has supported new x86 chipsets on day-1 since forever now; compare that to Broadcom or Apple Silicon's "best effort" community support that often takes years to boot into a graphical environment. Forget about stability or regression testing, it's a tinkertoy.

This is a shame because all the ARM licensees worth buying hardware from always have higher margins on smartphones or services. They have no commitment to supporting the PC or server market, let alone the software they use or featureset they depend on. It's no wonder that ARM adoption is stalling on the runway while Power11 gets upstream kernel support and RISC-V displaces integrated ARM ICs. Their only stakeholder is making their money off iPhone apps, not professional software.

Get a recent AMD or Intel laptop, add Linux, and install TLP. Idk if you'll get 12hr or not, but my Asus PX13 survived a 9hr+ intercontinental flight while working on a C++ codebase including compilation in Sublime Text with clangd LSP plugin (and no, I can't fall asleep on planes lol)

> but software on Snapdragon is taking a lot of time to catch up and it screams M$ lobby to me

On Linux?

The hard reality is that Apple invests in SoftBank, the owner of ARM's IP, and nobody in the Linux (or Windows) world does the same. They really just don't care. There aren't entrenched hardware manufacturers that want to reprise the featureset of UEFI on ARM. You will be waiting forever if you demand an ARM laptop that works like an x86 one with Linux.

ARM has been like this forever, and it's unlikely it will change due to Asahi or Apple Silicon. ARM lives or dies based on Apple's treatment of it, no other corporate stakeholder has comparable control over the ISA.

Last time I was at FOSDEM was about a decade ago, it was kind of ironic to see so much Apple gear around, given the conference tone.

I'd suggest that top non-Apple businesspeople try using a MacBook for a few weeks, hopefully it sparks some fresh thinking and decisions. Like it or not, Apple's advantage in battery life (and processor efficiency) is remarkable. If I recall correctly, Samsung made a real dent in the iPhone's lead with the Galaxy S2 around 2011, four years after the iPhone launched in 2007. But with the M1 chips released in 2020, Apple's lead this time around seems poised to last even longer.

Note: not an Apple fanboy.

> businesspeople

Well, there's your leading qualifier. Covid taught us that businesspeople can do their work on an iPad with Google Docs if they had to. It's not much of a surprise to anyone that they can do their work on a Mac with a souped-up iPhone processor.

My shock with Apple Silicon is how it collapses with non-browser-oriented tasks. The moment I stop watching YouTube it's like I'm back on Linux in 2008 again, trying to run everything through a Windows VM. My old Pro Tools plugins? Gotta use a VM, Rosetta won't work. A modern OpenGL program? Gotta wrestle depreciation flags to compile it. Even my old Homebrew casks had to get rewritten because Apple Silicon had to switch stuff around again.

By the time people insisted "try the M2 for a few weeks!" I was already dailying NixOS. MacOS is continuing the frying-pan-to-fire arc it started ever since 10.14.

I referred to business people who can take decisions in companies such as Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft to see how far are they.

Your experience as a developer doesn't represent a generalized view and that's why many developers use Apple computers. People are different.

I echo that wish.

I'm about to try the Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon Q Elite with Linux so we'll see how it goes.

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