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Comment by evilmonkey19 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone tell me why there isn't almost any laptop with Linux and ARM? Is it more efficient than x86 though

Software/driver compatibility and rational fear of change from users.

(My work laptop is one of the few ARM laptops: Thinkpad T14s with Quallcomm Snapdragon Elite)

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you think of that laptop? What kind of workloads do you run and how is battery life? What OS? Would you choose it again?

Was trying to install Linux on it, though its not working like a standard x86 laptop (for the installer on debian for example).

Battery is good, hardware is really rock solid (though I dislike the new plastic for the keyboard).

Really can’t complain, it’s nearly as good as my Macbook.

It runs Windows 11 today, and everything I need runs fine (jetbrains, rustc, clang, msvc, terraform and of course python).

I’m a technical CTO with infrastructure background, most of my time is spent in spreadsheets these days unfortunately.

Cool, thanks!

How is the bootloader/peripheral compatibility on the non-SBC ARM systems these days? Can you plug in a boot disk on different machine and expect it to just work? My main problem with ARM is that many manufacturers act as if they're special little snowflakes and deserve to have their custom patched kernel/bootloader/whatever.

This is the goal of the Arm SystemReady compliance label. The selection is still pretty limited and what's out there is generally buggy, but there's a few boards out there you can buy like the Orion O6 [0]. If you just want a stable system with predictable performance, you're probably better off with a more traditional system though.

[0] https://radxa.com/products/orion/o6/

Afaik a lot of bootloaders are proprietary/wonky, a lot of SOCs run custom bootloaders.

However if you do manage to boot things up, hardware with open-source drivers should just work, for example Jeff Geerling has couple of videos on youtube about running his RPi with external AMD graphics cards connected via PCIe, and it works.

It is a pain to make any new platform useful enough for large adoption. Apple made a lot of effort to get MacBook M1 useable, same for AWS with Graviton. Eventually it will be adopted for Linux laptops too, even without a specific vendor focusing on it, but it will take time.

Chromebooks are essentially this, but not that great for local development.

So then one solution might be to buy a Chromebook, and put regular Linux on it? I don’t think the Chromebook are locked down.

Yes you can do that, I think there are also chroot options; its running a Linux kernel already.

edit: actually it looks like this era is coming to an end; Crouton was archived earlier this year. Probably it still works on older models: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Depends on which one, and what you want to locally develop.

Is there one that even has a full keyboard?

HP makes a 17" Chromebook if that's what you're after.

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