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Comment by ktosobcy | Hacker News Reader

I like the rise of ARM… first AMD and then "PC world" followed suite with Snapdragon. With the latest Elite I think that my next machine (after MPB M1, which is still perfectly fine machine in 2025) will be PC laptop with ~Snapdragon (or something similar) with Linux... I'm fedup with Apples more and more stupid changes and limitations :/ (I actually disabled automatic updates to avoid LiquidTahoe!)

For me cool and silent device is more important than raw power, and we are in moment where the CPU is not that important (more so - memory)

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Dunno I remember reading an article about one of the first Snapdragon PCs - they concluded that while the CPU side was pretty good (including, surprisingly availablity of native ARM ports, and x86 emulation), the GPU was far behind typical PC offerings in sophistication, and was unable to run the complex and compute shader heavy workloads required by modern games, shader compilers were buggy, and advanced features were missing or poorly implemented, which made it an expensive word processing machine.

I'm not sure if they fixed their newer GPUs but they really ought to.

You get cca the same graphics as top android phones get, which is pretty decent. Of course it won't compete with 5090 but who would expect that

That's the whole point - these GPUs have impressive paper scores, but are designed with traditional, outdated ideas of shader pipelines in mind, and either cannot support flexible modern shading models/compute, or these features have tons of bugs, or end up being being much slower than the paper specs would suggest.

Essentially they can't run most PC games/ graphics software made in the past decade

> I actually disabled automatic updates to avoid LiquidTahoe

Is there even a way to automatically upgrade to a major macOS version? Automatic update settings are only for minor/patch and security responses.

Yeah but even for device administrators using bleeding edge “Declarative Device Management” the “your Mac must be on this version by this time” thing is really hit or miss. I was testing it yesterday just telling a test computer to update to 15.7.1 and while I got nagged to hell, it never actually rebooted to start the update. This is despite claims in each of the nag messages that it would.

At least Apple is still somewhat deferential to the user experience.

Hmm... that may be true. I just disabled everything in preferences to avoid it completely...

> will be PC laptop with ~Snapdragon (or something similar) with Linux...

Before you do that really research the exact model you plan on buying, and how much support it truly has in Linux. Qualcomm has not exactly lived up to their own hyped intentions of good support on Linux, and that provides a foundation of sand for hardware vendors to further drop the ball on when it comes to Linux support.

Apparently, some models built on the Elite platform have reportedly great support, while others don't. My experience with Linux on ARM SoCs, outside of servers, has made me very wary about using consumer products for desktop Linux with them. You really don't want to be dependent on the vendor, or some random people in their free time, for their custom kernel forks or Linux images, and that seems to be the trend in the non-server ARM boards + Linux ecosystem.

100%. A huge issue with the ARM ecosystem is that there's no widely adopted UEFI-like standard, so there's no runtime discovery of hardware configuration and things like the booting process and partitioning are extremely different between different machines. You pretty much need a Linux image built specifically for the particular hardware, unlike in the x86 world where you just need a Linux image which can boot using UEFI and discover all relevant hardware through either UEFI, ACPI and PCI.

Are there any plans to have similar solution?

Is this the reason, why the Android echosystem is so abysmal when it comes to hardware driver support?

The ARM server ecosystem has it solved with SBSA, which includes ACPI, UEFI, etc as part of the standard.

There are some ARM consumer computers that implement UEFI, etc, though.

The issue is that it's cheaper to just put together bespoke boards and not implement industry standards that are expected on PCs. Vendors don't have to worry about supporting anything other than the hardware and images they ship, so they don't see a reason to make third party OS support viable.

> Is this the reason, why the Android echosystem is so abysmal when it comes to hardware driver support?

Theoretically, Android should have all of the same drivers as Linux, along with Android-specific drivers that are abstracted over stable driver interface instead of the unstable Linux interface.

What usually happens is the plethora of drivers that vanilla Linux ships with aren't built for, and distributed with, phones/tablets, and the Android drivers only have to support that specific board's hardware. Then, over time, the kernel doesn't get updated so new hardware won't be supported the longer you use the device.

If you're asking why Android devices have poor support for Linux, the OP's answer is the exact reason why.

Thanks for the heads up. In general Linux hardware support was for a long time hit-or-miss so I kinda expected that. On the other hand I said that with the hope that the things will improve significantly by the time I will be upgrading the machine (which is still years away; I stayed with previous MBP for 8 years so I still have like 3-5 years to go :D)

These days x86 PCs are well supported on Linux, the kinds of problems you can encounter with ARM boards can be unique and just don't exist on PCs for a variety of reasons.

Well, I don't have recent experience with Linux on real hardware since quite a long time but I'm aware that the situation improve significantly to the point where it's mostly no-issue (save for GPU drivers, ekhm) so my hope is same will happen with ARM.

Are there viable options? I run Asahi on my M1 Air and it performs quite well, but certain software like Android Studio has issues and hiccups. I’d love a decent ultrabook to replace my Air, but I hate Windows and got overwhelmed with reading Reddit forums to know which PCs will and won’t work with Linux. I don’t mind doing some setup, but I’d rather not be disappointed by non-functional or missing drivers for WiFi, Bluetooth, display, etc.

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