No, android does not count.
Is there anyone who daily drives Linux on apple silicon or other ARM hardware? If so, then how is your experience, would you recommend it?
For at least 3 years, I’ve been wanting to get an apple silicon mac to daily drive Linux on, lately I’ve been seriously considering getting one of these machines, or even other ARM hardware, like the thinkpad x13s or even the new Qualcomm laptops.
I’m pretty much sold on a used macbook air m1 at this point, but I still wish to hear what other people have to say
main issue with apple stuff is the ridiculous pricing for memory.
$500 to add just 8gb of ram and 128gb of SSD? What’s that, the year 2012?
It’s 2024 and it’s ridiculous that a $1500 laptop comes with the same amount of memory of a $300 Motorola smartphone
I got Asahi working on M1, and everything works fine aside from the camera and hibernation. The second is a bit of a bummer cause the battery keeps draining fairly quickly even when you put it to sleep.
I run debian on an x13s. I would not recommend it if you are an average tux member.
My recommendation would be to wait for the first devices from manufactures like tuxedo and the snapdragon elite x. And every device may have its own quirks, so wait for reviews.
It was a hard time. I daily drive it but it still remains unpolished.
A beginner linux friend of mine had an apple air m1. He ran linux on it but decided to ditch it for a framework. So i assume milage depends on your capabilities. I wouldn’t go that route and instead opted one and a half years ago for that lenovo device.
It has the best chassis I ever owned but the usability is limited. E.g.: Since Kernel 6.8 I now have to issue su -c “echo start > /some/module/thingy/mode” after each start to get external monitor, sound and battery working. Had to manually research this in IRC logs.
My two cents.
I have a Libre LePotato, Pinebook and Pinephone. They’re fine for most of my use cases, but they don’t handle games too well. They are also not great for VMs or emulation, and no chance in hell would I use any for my home media server.
That being said, I’m starting to see ARM CPU desktops in my feeds, and I think one of those would be fine for everything but gaming (which is more an issue of the availability of native binaries and not necessarily outright performance). TBH at that price point, using off-chip memory and GPU, I don’t see much reason to go with ARM; maybe the extra cores, but I can’t imagine there is much in the way of electrical efficiency that SoCs entail.
I used my Chromebook Duet 3 from Lenovo which has a Snapdragon ARM chip.
I installed a custom compiled Kernel with some weird distro iso maker from a dude for such devices. It adds a few drivers to make various things work.
Bluetooth, Audio, Usi pen, Touchscreen worked. It was nice.
The USI pen and touchscreen glitches sometimes out, which forces me to suspend this convertable for a second and wake it up to fix the issue.
I couldn’t really install lunarvim or some other development tools because some things just are not compileable/installable. I didnt bither eith waydroid as It was too complex for me to really grasp how to install the header files and so on.
I did use KDE (5.25 I think), with Wayland and it was good actually. Xournalpp for writing and logseq for storing knowledge in patterns, which sometims had buggy graphics on Wayland for some reason.
Things like RNote couldn’t work because the Mesa drivers weren’t really installed or smth and kernel header files were needed here too I think.
Firefox with touch on wayland also was a nice experience that worked pretty great (but needs environment value to be set for Wayland).
I accepted that I will get a new device after 2 Years of using that tablet and replacing paper on school. Did work great for me. I prefer Penoval Pens. They have them for all devices. Usi and MPP and much more.
So I got the Starlite 5 (from starlabs.systems) which has a worse Battery lifetime than expected (I think but not stress tested. OS shows 3 to 6 hours sometimes but advertised was 14h) but at least I can even run some small Steam games on that n200 intel chip and install all Applications I want because its AMD64 Architecture cpu. It kinda overheats at the top right corner.
Note that both products are convertables, or rather Tablets with a detachable keyboard.
So at the end. I can use this Chromebook convertable for some narrow things but not for everything, like a Computer should be able to. But maybe all the skills you need are capable to be run on a slow Snapdragon with aarch64 Architecture. Unsure how Apple M1 is there compared to that.
