If you are thinking about getting a Tuxedo, I suggest to get something else. I got one because they promised fwupd support, upstreamed drivers and maybe coreboot support. None of that is working even years afterwards. People from the kernel got so fed up with them, they considered blacklisting them [1]. That seemed like a wakeup call as they now at least started with upstreaming drivers.
If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application. It's so bad, volunteers created an alternative. Even they are getting tired of Tuxedo though [2]
The device is also not repairable at all. I had an issue with my screen and they gave me a quote of ~200€+ to repair it. I'm sure I could fix it myself for a lot less, but no parts are available and no instructions.
I hope they improve, but for now I'm disillusioned and would not buy it again.
The entire software stack of TUXEDO is tightly integrated, instead of working on a generic solution.
That sounds like the same situation with smartphones, which are nearly all ARM but every SoC or variation of one is different enough that the software is customised for each one.
If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
WTF. I thought Android being Java was already going too far, but they seem to have gone to a whole new level of insanity.
I'm a happy user of my second Tuxedo laptop after using the first for over 7 years, repairing several parts. I found their support very responsive and spare parts affordable. Your points are valid though. If you don't like their custom stuff, the device also works fine with a stock Linux install (Ubuntu in my case).
They're also the only OEM that replied to me when I was trying to reverse engineer a similar laptop to theirs. I think that alone should put them into a league of their own. Only two companies have ever properly replied to me when I asked about source code or hardware documentation: one is a chinese company, the other is Tuxedo.
Frankly it's bizarre that a Linux focused vendor thinks it's better to keep their device drivers outside of the kernel. Why would I buy a rebadged Clevo laptop from Tuxedo where I'm stuck either running their special Tuxedo distro or fiddling around with compiling kernel modules on other distros, when I could buy a much better laptop for the same price from a vendor who doesn't even advertise Linux support and get full out of the box hardware support on any distro I choose?
I bought a Tuxedo machine. While the situation is not perfect (I had to install driver packages on Fedora), everything works perfectly - including standby.
My last machine was a Thinkpad, and I never got it to work nearly as well. Standby mostly didn't work and when docking it, external screens would be arranged incorrectly unless I rebooted. USB ports also did not activate when docked, so I had a script for resetting the USB devices. Sometimes a new kernel version would come along and cause it to start freezing.
I did check out other laptops before buying the tuxedo (t14s g6 amd, zenbook s14), but according to the information available at the time, those machines had lots of issues. They were also more expensive.
Therefore I'm very curious about which laptop that you think is both better and cheaper than tuxedo, and has full hardware support out of the box?
I have a tuxedo 14" i7-12700H with 3050. And it is terrible. Specs are nice, price was hefty, but in the end it does not deliver. Battery is horrible, charging is disruptive, power budget is not enough. All stems from the nvidia card that I paid serious bucks to get included but it makes a decent laptop into a very bad one as the power delivery system just does not seem to be able to cope with it.
Anyway I would go with FRAMEWORK there. Sadly they did not deliver to my address when I was in the market, but now they do.
Hopefully latest Tuxedo does have better hardware support? Mine has problems with charging, usb-c charging is even worse (slow charge normal performance or ok charge and 5W throttling which makes all cores go at 1GHz), battery saving feature that hides 10% of battery capacity in firmware etc. They also stopped delivering any firmware updates after a few months.
The laptop 3050 card is the worst piece of computer hardware I've ever owned. Literally just heats up the laptop and still delivers shit performance.
I've got an MSI laptop and I've settled on simply never using the Nvidia card (prime-select iGPU only). The integrated graphics have access to 16gb of ram (versus the Nvidia card's 4gb) and deliver better performance without the whole laptop hitting 100 degrees.
I have a Clevo-based laptop. Our experiences were similar. The nvidia dGPU offers terrible performance and doesn't do much besides heat up the laptop. I disabled mine via the firmware. The CPU reaches 90 degrees when given almost any sort of load. It quickly thermal throttles itself down to uselessness despite three loud fans. I often have to use systemd shells with CPU quotas to manage this.
I hope the Asahi Linux project succeeds so I can buy the fabled Apple silicon laptops just to run Linux on them.
I just double checked the firmware setup and it seems I was misremembering things. There's a toggle between "DISCRETE" and "MSHybrid" which means dGPU only and hybrid iGPU + dGPU graphics. I use it in MSHybrid mode with nouveau drivers. This keeps the dGPU in the lowest possible power mode.
It still wastes around 7-15 W doing pretty much nothing according to my monitoring script. That's the entire power budget of a single board computer like the Latte Panda Mu.
Which thinkpad was the one you had so many issues with, and which dock? I’ve had a few issues with my caldigit ts3 and ryzen 7840 p14s thinkpad but on the whole everything works pretty well. Worst issue has been a dumb regression with the Qualcomm ath12k firmware that wasn’t backed out for months.
I have the same thinkpad as working computer and InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 9 with 8845 as home computer. Lenovo has better upstream linux support but I was able to make both work without issues. I use debian testing/unstable.
Lenovo pros:
- better case
- better keyboard
Tuxedo pros:
- significantly cheaper price
- two fan setup enables faster performace (it is stable with 90W power consumption)
- almost twice as long battery life (tuxedo has bigger batery with similar weight and size)
- two nvme slots
If you want more powerful notebook with slightly worse build quality, tuxedo is good choice.
I think it was Tuxedo that accidentally ended up with GPLv3 drivers and no ability to relicense them.
Which means they can't be upstreamed because GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 (for the same reason CDDLv1.0 is considered incompatible).
They either need to track every copyright from the contractors (who AFAIK didn't sign over licensing to Tuxedo) to relicense the code, or write drivers again from scratch.
Having to use their specific drivers is a bit annoying, but I honestly prefer that over drivers that dont work or dont exist at all.
I really hope they can bring their stuff upstream at one point, but I can't deny that using their laptops hasn't been good experiences.
> If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
> It's so bad, volunteers created an alternative.
Years ago I wrote my own Linux user space driver for the keyboard on my Clevo based laptop. The Clevo application was so terrible I reverse engineered it and made my own Linux free software replacement.
"The patches check for the gxtp7380, ite_8291, ite_8291_lb, ite_8297, ite_829x, stk8321, tuxedo_compatibility_check, tuxedo_io, tuxedo_nb02_nvidia_power_ctrl, tuxedo_nb04_keyboard, tuxedo_nb04_wmi_ab, tuxedo_nb04_wmi_bs, tuxedo_nb04_sensors, tuxedo_nb04_power_profiles, tuxedo_nb04_kbd_backlight, tuxedo_nb05_keyboard, tuxedo_nb05_kbd_backlight, tuxedo_nb05_power_profiles, tuxedo_nb05_ec, tuxedo_nb05_sensors, tuxedo_nb05_fan_control, tuxi_acpi, tuxedo_tuxi_fan_control, clevo_wmi, tuxedo_keyboard, clevo_acpi, and uniwill_wmi kernel modules and will taint if they are present."
That's not what I would describe as "resolving a license compatibility issue"
I interacted with Tuxedo quite a few times back then while I was figuring this stuff out. They even sent me source code for a pre-release version of their Electron app. It didn't help much in the end but they proved to be much nicer and more responsive than other manufacturers and even Clevo itself.
Wish they'd emailed me about their driver. I could have helped develop it, especially if they had given me documentation.
I briefly explored the idea of turning it into a kernel module and contributing it to the kernel. While reading Linux driver source code, some comments gave me the impression they'd prefer code remained in user space if possible. Since I already had a working user space driver, I decided not to contribute it.
I wrote the above program because Clevo's app was Windows only and so aggravating to use it defies description. Looks like Tuxedo ran into the same problem with their Electron app, if the complaints in this thread are any indication... Déjà vu.
I would describe it as exactly "resolving a license compatibility issue". Taint in linux kernel refers to marking this kernel as not supported, which often just means not purely GPLv2 compatible anymore. Proprietary AMD and nVidia drivers also cause taints. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/118117/251582
Yeah, the person you're responding to is taking "taint" to mean a literal ban situation; versus the very real status that exists in Linux Kernel development.
"TAINTing" a driver/code doesn't mean it's blacklisted, it means it can't be upstreamed into the GPL codebase. It means that if you build a Kernel with it, it's no longer considered OSS-friendly.
There are plenty of legitimate and viable codebases that use TAINTed kernels. The DoD, various government entities around the world, some commercial interests, etc.
It is, specifically because Tuxedo licensed their modules as GPLv3, instead of GPLv2 (the module license declaration only has 'GPL', to make this confusing), causing a mild license compatibility issue, and since they've had external contributions, it's not so easy for them to fix it. And it's not a ban, just a flag that gets set.
Basically the same things happened to my tuxedo also. With the addition of having to change batteries once a year, because it would drop to half it's factory charge, which wasn't really sufficient. I also gave up on them when they wanted so much money for a screen change (which died after about 3-4 years).
I've replaced it with the new framework 13 inch, which so far works well, but I've only had it for 4-5 months. ( well, but not perfect, because the new AMD AI CPU has issues with suspend on linux)
That's a shame, I got a 13 w/ the previous non-AI AMD 7 7840U in April, and it's been rock-solid running Pop_OS. I wondered at the time if I should have waited for the newer CPUs...
Oh? I'd seriously considered buying the 13 w/this AMD CPU and I guess I naively thought it would be ideal. What sort of problems with suspend are you seeing?
I have a T14 Gen 5 AMD. No issues with suspend/resume at all. NixOS, kernel 6.12. The Ryzen AI APUs are fairly new, so it may take a few months for things to settle.
I haven't spent time investigating if my specific setup is the problem, or an actual bug in the drivers, but after I resume from suspend, the btrfs root fs is in a read-only state.
The only solution is to reboot/shutdown, but it takes a long time and there are some scary fs checks running. Luckily no lost data so far. Currently I'm just shutting down the machine every time because it the boot times are quite fast.
Slimbook (Spanish OEM) basically sells the same ODM designs as Tuxedo and is an option. They have a few cobranded (KDE etc) versions that contribute to the development teams.
Otherwise at this point I believe the Framework laptops have pretty solid Linux support and is a good option if you're ok w/ so-so battery life.
While StarLabs has shipped products before, I'd be careful with them. That StarFighter laptop was supposed to ship years ago, and I don't think any have been delivered yet. Here's a Reddit thread [1] from three years ago saying delivery would be in a few months.
The problem with System76 is that Lenovo exists. There isn’t much of a real reason to buy a “standard laptop” like system76 over a higher volume OEM like Lenovo.
With Framework you’re at least getting the extreme modularity and upgradeability as a major differentiator.
But with System76 you’re essentially getting a regular laptop that you could get from any other major brand. You’ll have an easier time getting parts with Lenovo.
Unfortunately I don't know about a good alternative from Europe. I'd probably get a Framework if my device stops working. They seem to work hard at upstreaming things and use Linux standards. They also connected with the GNOME foundation, so there might be some collaboration in the future
https://entroware.com from the UK gets mentioned here and there, but I think they don't do any software development at all, and only repackage OEM laptops.
I am running a tuxedo since 6 years and I am still happy with it. Had to use their support once to replace the cooling assembly because one of the fan bearings started to ger noisy after 5 years of 24/7 use, the replacement was 100 Euros for the whole copper+heatpipe+two fan assembly. The machine is still outperforming many other machines that exist today and the sceeen is one of the best I have seen (OLED).
You are right that tuxedo has some issues. But also take into account price of their notebooks. Even lenovo, hp, dell etc. are not without issues in the similar price category. I take it as cheap HW for advanced users.
But you are right that not having drivers upstream is really strange decision.
There are parts in the industry that are not meant for end users.
I service copiers and printers.
The fixing unit is not meant to be installed by a handyman, thats why you dont get to buy it.
You can cook yourself, it works with 230V....
Toner and drum unit are sold to customers.
Respectfully, nothing about that applies to a laptop. This has been well proven over the years, that with good forethought and making parts available laptops can be highly repairable.
The display unit is nothing an enduser should replace. Does every user know how to handle the delicate display and how to carefully install the LVDS cable?
In most modern cars you cant replace the windscreen with cameras, heating wires in your backyard without the calibration software.
You can try it, but you will fail.
Don’t be ridiculous. I replaced screens on (old) Thinkpads and a Framework and it’s literally a 5 min job, no experience needed. Both have excellent repair documentation. With Framework you can replace any component in that time frame. No, really. Some years ago, with Thinkpads you didn’t even have to disassemble the machine for many components… eg. you pressed a button and the lappy ejected the hard drive.
I know quite a few non-techies who replaced their phone screens themselves. That’s been unexpected and impressive to me. Honestly, you can get unlucky, but in my experience, electronic components are surprisingly resistant to abuse.
Sure, if everything is soldered or glued down it‘s intentionally hard to self-service, but that’s also down to your consumer choices. There is nothing inherently unserviceable.
Take a look at the framework laptop for how accessible replacing parts on a laptop can be if you put even a little bit of effort into it. Most people are entirely capable of the manual dexterity, they just lack clear instructions, or things artificially require specialized equipment and software and more fiddly, difficult, and risky steps because it's either not a priority or it's actively a priority to discourage it.
Displays are absolutely end user repairable if the end user has experience. Allowing an end user to perform repairs shouldn't mean the repair should be doable by every single end-user.
If that was the case we wouldn't be allowed to replace AA batteries.
230VAC mains electrical fittings are openly sold in DIY shops in every country in the European Union without mass-cookings occurring as a result. This reeks of utterly unearned elitism.
Yep. I think pretty much every youngster gets some basic education (besides getting years of physics in high-school): disarm the group/fuse, double check with a power tester, make sure you are not causing any shorts. I don't know anyone who calls an electrician for replacing a light fitting, a power outlet, or light switches.
Besides that some European countries have required for decades that new houses/apartment have central residual-current circuit breakers for the whole house (unlike the US where as far as I understand they are only required in certain areas and are often in the socket and not centralized).
Can’t say I got any particular education, but honestly knowing it’s quite dangerous kinda pushes you in the right direction, if you’re not super dim, too. And usually you can call a parent or someone who knows what’s up, to get the instructions or help the first time.
I do that work almost every day. What if the untalented handyman crunches a live cable and the metallic frame is on fire?
You can repair how and what you want, its your house and children.
>You can repair how and what you want, its your house and children.
They cannot.
>The device is also not repairable at all. I had an issue with my screen and they gave me a quote of ~200€+ to repair it. I'm sure I could fix it myself for a lot less, but no parts are available and no instructions.
Ever heard of the old displays with an inverter that produced around 700V?
Can zap grandpa into the coffin...
THats why they did not sell it to customers.
Everybody obviously works on a powered on laptop, with fully charged capacitors. With those capacitor delivering at leat 100mA to your heart for good measure.
It's like when people work on their car, they do it at highway speed, using a nacelle precariously balanced under the car, with the front wheels propped up on dollies for access.
Two of the reasons I eventually gave up on Desktop Linux, were virtualization getting good enough for just keep using Windows instead, back in the day with VMware Workstation and Virtual Box, nowadays with WSL (macOS is anyway UNIX enough for me to care otherwise).
And exactly the same experience with OEM vendors that were supposed to be Linux friendly, on my case the whole netbooks effort, where graphics, video decoding and wlan never worked as well on Windows, even though they were supposed to.
Dell XPS also had their issues for something that was supposed to be Canonical certified as running GNU/Linux properly.
It seems Android, ChromeOS and WebOS are the only ones where OEMs actually care to make it work properly, naturally the cloud and IoT vendors with their custom distros as well.
I've been running Linux on my laptop and on my workstation since the 90's. Still using it as my main driver. Fedora Kinoite is my distro of choice, and Lenovo AMD Thinkpad T14s the laptop. Everything works flawless, and it's still pretty fast even though it's two years old already.
And I do not miss at all the Microsoft bullsh*t on tracking and advertising. Or the general sluggishness of Windows.
I used to be quite cynical about these posts. I used Linux as my main desktop from 1994-2007 and switched to Mac then. I would periodically try on laptops Linux again, but there were always things broken in bad ways.
Early this year I bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD. In contrast to when I had a T14 Gen 1 AMD early 2020s, everything just works. All the hardware works, suspend/resume works, all the hardware comes up after a resume, etc.
Lately I have been using my ThinkPad much more than my MacBook Pro. NixOS is a superpower to me and having NixOS on a laptop is living the dream.
I’ve used it from probably… 2010 or so, to now. I recall some stuff like WiFi being vaguely annoying in the beginning. But, things seemed to get pretty good post 2015.
You were here for the really hard stuff, and missed the beginning of the good times, I think. Unlucky! Oh well. Welcome back!
I did use a Ryzen Linux desktop from ~2018-2020 besides a MacBook, but Apple Silicon was so insanely good when it was introduced that I went back fully back to Mac on the desktop. But Ryzen mobile APUs have been catching up.
I have also used headless Linux machines throughout my Mac vacation :).
With regards to the hard stuff. 1994-2007 was from my 12th to my 25th, basically overlapping with when I was a high school/university student. So, plenty of time and not enough money for a Mac or some commercial UNIX system. That period was also super exciting, especially up till the dotcom crash a lot of people thought that Linux was going to take over the desktop (anyone remember Corel Linux and even WordPerfect on Linux?). Linux did take over, but in different ways than we imagined, the server was kinda expected after the mid-nineties, but Android not.
The only problem with this approach is that I don't want to use Apple's software, or rely on a commercial operating system. The hardware is great, but not so much the software.
- Fully declarative. I can bring up a system in 5-10 minutes (depending on internet speed) and the system configuration is exactly as any other system.
- Great modules for programs/services in NixOS and home manager. So I typically do not have to figure out what configuration format something uses. Most common options are exposed as module options and for options that are not exposed, it's often possible to write the configuration in Nix (or worst case a string that gets added to the configuration). I can access the documentation of all modules with a simple _man configuration.nix_ or `man home-configuration.nix`.
- I can override arbitrary packages with custom build options, etc. I don't have to maintain separate .spec/rules files or anything. I can just put a somePackage.override/overrideAttrs somewhere in my system configuration and the package customizations are there with my system configuration and always get built with the system.
- Packaging something to hook it up in my system is low-effort. nixpkgs is the largest distribution package set (according to repology). But sometimes something is missing or I want to add some of my own projects as packages, unless it's some insanely bad proprietary application, I can do it in a few minutes.
- Atomic updates/rollbacks.
- Ad-hoc or project-specific development shells (though that is more Nix than NixOS).
I know that the learning curve can be steep, but once you really get Nix and NixOS, it's kinda like being the master of the universe, erm, I mean your systems.
I don't think anybody ever sold nixos that good to me before.
I might try it again. Last time I really did not like that any minute config change would take 15s to apply.
But the biggest issue for me, is that right now I have a good enough solution, that allows for config file update from applications. I have a small git repo, with one shell script, that symlinks config files, and even generates a few. And so backing up the latest config changes from KDE, freecad, etc, is a git add & commit away. I have another shell script to setup the base Ubuntu the way I want. And my data is replicated via syncthing.
NixOS gives you the ability to define your system declaratively, upgrade or tweak without fear of breaking anything, and the ability to launch shells with arbitrary and well defined sets of dependencies.
10+ years of T440s here. Most of the time a Fedora base. Both batteries at 50% health but the only thing that really is noticeable over the years is the missing hardware for todays video codecs.
I know, there are dozens on Linux forums, every time I was searching for workarounds.
Also it isn't as if I haven't subscribed to Linux Journal during its whole lifetime, or LWN, or even used to write M$ on email signatures and Usenet messages, for that matter.
Signed someone that knows Linux since kernel 1.0.9, yet has better things to do than making it work.
It's funny, for me it's just like you said but with the commercial offerings. I just can't get them to work as I want, like with Linux. To each of its own, but I doubt I'm the only one sharing this issue. I don't have time to deal issues with macOS or Windows, I have work to do...
Before the Tuxedo, I used an old Lenovo. I didn't check before if it works well with Linux, but it worked flawlessly. I am so used to devices working well and not having to think much about drivers. That's probably why I am disappointed by Tuxedo. They market themselves to Linux users but until recently they did not emphasize upstreaming and embracing standards.
What I love about Lenovo besides PSRef and all the maintenance/repair manuals (with part numbers, so that you know what to get if something needs to be replaced), etc. is that they often certify laptops for Linux.
They also seem to really care about supporting Linux. E.g. WWAN modems need proprietrary unlock procedures these days thanks to the FCC [1]. Most vendors would shrug and say 'sorry, we only support Windows', Lenovo has a repo with Linux support for all the modems that ThinkPads support (you can only use supported modems, because the FCC apparently only certifies laptop/modem combinations, not individual modems):
I ran a Dell XPS (not even the Canonical certified version) for a few years at a past job, and everything worked pretty well under Ubuntu. But it's always a matter of which exact hardware combination has mainstream support, and if the version you get doesn't e.g. have a shitty WiFi chip with bad support.
Yes. This is why I rather check Linux support od chips in a machine that I am planning to buy. Not that much work but you will not get unpleasant surprise when Wi-Fi do not work.
Funny to read replies to your comment. One can be sure that on HN for every single critical comment about Linux viability one gets multiple responses claiming that Linux is perfect and without issues.
Inb4: I have used Linux exclusively from 2019 to 2024. It wasn't that bad but it wasn't flawless. At least once per month I met some issue that took few hours to solve. Currently on Win11, zero problems (yes, I am using pirated LTSC IoT version, how did you know?)
No system is without issues. We used ThunderBolt docks that worked perfectly with macOS, until one major release they became a hell to use because Apple broke something (which manifested as a display not coming back after resume, requiring several plugs/unplugs).
As everyone knows, Windows has its own fair share of issues. The first is that it is not a Unix :).
Lol. I'm unplugging and re plugging my HDMI display for like 3 years now. Thanks Apple for being so stupid that you can't even get external displays to work properly
In this case it turns out they got… one comment that was strongly pro-Linux, one that mentioned they didn’t have trouble but only as an aside before going on to discuss Tuxedo, and one that was softly positive but acknowledged the trouble of checking hardware beforehand.
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
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 machines have no touchpad or touchscreen support. Listing them as "supported" requires a creative interpretation of the term.
between booting and being able to everything except supporting non existent proprietary drivers for touchpad and screen from Microsoft is quite a difference.
I'm waiting for this. I like low powered laptops as more of a terminal. I dont want the apple ecosystem, but I'm getting really tired of windows, high end chromebooks kinda disappeared, I have Linux servers at home. Do I have to wait much longer?
An alternative that is available right now is to get an M1/M2 MacBook Air and run Asahi Linux on it. The older models are pretty cheap, but still quite fast. There are some missing features, but it runs really well. I've been using it as my home driver for over a year and it's really solid.
I have a think pad I use this way. Super light, battery lasts forever but it’s super low powered. However, I use Tailscale to connect to my beefy desktop at home with ssh/tmux and Zed remote editing. It’s perfect.
Performance per watt is not far at all from M4. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 actually beats a M4 Max in e.g. Passmark per Watt (652 vs 625), and it's not much behind in other benchmarks.
With some tweaks, it can also be silent. Good ThinkPads are not far from the user experience delivered by the latest MacBooks, and they have the advantage of running free software and x86_64.
> the current Linux Kernel 6.15 already supports many commercial laptops:
Lenovo Yoga 7x,
Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6,
Dell XPS 13,
Asus Vivobook S15,
HP Omnibook x14,
Microsoft Surface 13/15
Has anybody had any first-hand experience with Linux on such laptops?
I run Linux on a Thinkpad T13s, with the previous generation of Snapdragon CPUs. It runs great - quick, excellent battery life and very stable. Installation is a bit obnoxious, but nothing a modestly seasoned Linux veteran can't handle.
Completely agree with this. Ubuntu installs from the standard ARM installer on the X13s and openSuse Tumbleweed needs a litte help at the start but then runs great.
It looks like the Snapdragon X gets quite a lot of support now and end of the year or earlier next year it should be quite useable for most.
When the Snapdragon X laptops came out they where all over 1000$ and I completely understand that the number of Linux kernel enthusiasts to set things up would initially be limited.
Used prices come down now and that will also help.
I have one of those too. Found a nice 32gb spec one on eBay for a good price. Last I tried Ubuntu the main issues were the speakers were very quiet and usb-c display out didn't work.
Not the original commentator.
With Linux I think battery life is ok, but not more.
I get about 8h out of it.
My battery shows 92% capacity, so there might be a bit more in it.
I was down-voted by saying back then (snapdragon x elite release date) that Qualcomm has no priority in making Linux a first class platform. Qualcomm does what Qualcomm does. I won't purchase a laptop which has no known Linux support.
I have an XPS 13. It does run linux, but so does every other laptop with an x86 chipset. It's horrible in pretty much every other way though. The battery, GPU fan, and left USB-C port failed successively shortly after the warranty was up.
In my case the biggest drawback is not being able to use an external screen via HDMI and the sound support (although you can workaround that with BT).
Let's not talk about widevine, I managed to eventually get it to work but it was very painful.
If we get full audio support and solve some of the widevine issues, this can easily become a daily driver for when I'm traveling or giving presentations.
Last I checked power management didn't work so they would run hot and burn through your battery. So unless there is full software support for hardware that makes laptops a portable computer, it's just not a practical solution for me.
Tho, I really want this to happen. As far as I've tested on Volterra (ms dev kit 2023), linux has a lot going right for it. there is a ton of ARM64 packages, and drivers just work (e.g. I had to wait so long for Wacom to release WoA drivers while it worked out the box with ARM64 linux builds). the potential is there and it's great.
On a last note, not being able to ship necessary firmware and relying on a WoA boot drive still sucks.
Poor power management has always been the last bastion keeping me from using Linux in certain machines. My desktop won’t sleep or wake up at all (or it will wake but show a grey screen and glitch out) on any distro I’ve tried. Every time I use it on a laptop the battery life is terrible. Makes me sad.
Power mgmt has worked very well on our old Dell precision that came with Linux, and two newer Frameworks (1 Intel, 1 AMD).
Basically perfect for over a decade.
I'm waiting for Android Virtualization Framework to run a full Linux distro on my smartphone with portable monitor (glasses). Already using Termux but AVF is hopefully much more performant. Maybe the Samsung S26 Ultra will have full support. I might ditch my miniPC if this works out.
I've been playing with it[0] - it still has a few rough edges. It's rather slow to start up compared to firing up a VM in virt-manager, and when you shut it down you must wait for it to finish shutting down before trying to restart it.
Woe to you if Debian pushes a systemd update. It took repeated incantations with apt to get that update to take, because updating systemd would crash the VM Every. Damn. Time.
Oh, sorry, I missed that you meant running another distro under termux. Yes, that probably will be faster, I agree. (I thought we were talking about native termux, which doesn't have the proot perf hit)
I'm waiting for one of the headset vendors to support IMU-based HID mouse cursor control in hardware, with the same end goal in mind. In the meantime I'm stuck on amd64 with my little libinput driver[0].
I find it extremely comfortable. Considerably moreso than with my desk and monitor setup. I'm long sighted and the projection distance means I don't need glasses to see, and they don't get overly hot (nothing compared to a VR headset). Most significantly though, I can change the position of my head whenever I want without changing what I'm looking at, which makes a difference for my neck comfort, posture, etc.
To answer your question directly, I've done multiple 2-3 hour sessions at a time without taking the glasses off and have done 10+ hour days in them when away from home. At home I typically tend to use them for a couple of hours in the afternoons when I'm tired and more willing to sacrifice screen real estate for comfort.
The detail isn't the same and you have to plan your screen layout a bit (i.e. looking at code near the edges of the screen is annoying). But I think they're the future - a much bigger deal than VR or AR.
Awesome, I may try this out. I have similar eye issues and over the last couple years its actually been almost impossible for me to look at monitors in the afternoon after my eyes have fatigued.
It's not precisely a laptop, but I have an augmented reality cyberdeck using XReal AR glasses running into a battery powered Raspberry Pi 5 that I built, which runs pretty well. I feel like the Pis have long been a canary in the coalmine for Linux and ARM (first ARMHF and now ARM64) support.
If it's not fully supported and has major roadbumps, which it has, it is not supported. I don't know why companies take linux users as fools that'll accept anything thrown at them. Until lenovo can get their shit together and make a respectable laptop with 12h+ battery life, good build quality and a decent enough screen even on the worst configs, im not getting it
A little more context : in june 2024 at Computex, Tuxedo announced a possible christmas 2024 release [1]. A Qualcomm/Tuxedo collaboration was expected but did not materialize [2].
I'd really like to replace my old Thinkpad with a long-running, lightweight Linux laptop that can also do some gaming on the side (think Witcher 3 on good settings) but Snapdragon has not lived up to the hype AFAIK.
But big thumbs up to all the Linux devs that are working on improving the situation!
Not having the special hardware you are referring to means that the transpiled binaries have more fences than might be strictly necessary, which maybe gives a 5-10% performance hit depending on the use case?
It's not just for games. FEX-EMU is used here alongside Wine/Proton to run games but it'll also run the x64 version of other things. There's other layers like Box64 that do the same thing. For Linux, a lot of the software traditionally found in repos already has an ARM version and it's not as necessary. On Windows on ARM sometimes the only way to get an ARM native version is to run the Linux version under WSL.
Windows on ARM has allowed running x86 code from launch with Windows 10 and x64 code since Windows 11.
There's lots of responses but they miss the point. Rosetta let you run x86/64 apps without even knowing they were x86/64. Back when I ran Asahi, I searched far and wide, but Linux doesn't support that level of transparent integration. You always had to fuddle with the launch params.
Pedantic point, but Linux (the kernel) absolutely does. You can register an executable handler for amd64 binaries, and have Linux call that whenever one is invoked.
There is absolutely no user land infrastructure for using this in the way that Rosetta does on macOS, though. Feel free to contribute it!
Yes, with Asahi (Now a Fedora was Arch initially). Think the fingerprint reader still didn't work but not really tried. Also only one external monitor (or DisplayLink) but the screen, sound, battery life, performace all best any x86 I have used.
Does Linux arm64 run Windows x86 applications in Wine? I mean, I'd be surprised if it did, but I need that. Otherwise an arm64 Linux laptop is super tempting.
But tons of them also don't. And for those that don't, there are usually alternatives available, but they are just that tiny bit different. So while Docker works, there is extra effort needed to use it.
I am fed up with the linux world. I run Ubuntu on a randomly selected Thinkpad, everything works, outta the box.
Why should i buy a new laptop because it holds another cpu doing the exact workload?
I cant code faster, cant talk faster with people and being productive 8hrs strait is just a lie.
Since almost 10years i read about pre-installed devices, but i dont see them anywhere.
Most companies dont have business linux apps and they wont be available, an armada of developers is busy bringing the light of the webcam functioning.
Why not specialize in something else like software the entire world runs on like SAP or whatever?
Its nice to spend a rainy day to compile your kernel...but the outcome?
Nobody is telling you to buy a new laptop. Same goes for software. If it's not for you then don't use it. It's all about choice. And the entire Linux ecosystem is not a single entity to "specialize on SAP or whatever". I suspect a large portion of SAP systems already run Linux anyway.
You don't "have to" do anything, you can stay with the setup you're using right now just fine, I don't get the point of this post, you're fighting ghosts.
Why not switch to Windows then? You'll of course have to chuck that perfectly finely working laptop when Windows 12 declares it obsolete, but such is life there.
If you are thinking about getting a Tuxedo, I suggest to get something else. I got one because they promised fwupd support, upstreamed drivers and maybe coreboot support. None of that is working even years afterwards. People from the kernel got so fed up with them, they considered blacklisting them [1]. That seemed like a wakeup call as they now at least started with upstreaming drivers.
If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application. It's so bad, volunteers created an alternative. Even they are getting tired of Tuxedo though [2]
The device is also not repairable at all. I had an issue with my screen and they gave me a quote of ~200€+ to repair it. I'm sure I could fix it myself for a lot less, but no parts are available and no instructions.
I hope they improve, but for now I'm disillusioned and would not buy it again.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/TUXEDO-Drivers-Taint-Patches
[2] https://aaronerhardt.github.io/blog/posts/tuxedo_rs_update/
From your 2nd link:
The entire software stack of TUXEDO is tightly integrated, instead of working on a generic solution.
That sounds like the same situation with smartphones, which are nearly all ARM but every SoC or variation of one is different enough that the software is customised for each one.
If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
WTF. I thought Android being Java was already going too far, but they seem to have gone to a whole new level of insanity.
Android is not Java
While sadly true, it is close enough for a Java 17 LTS subset, even though it is Google's .NET with Kotlin having a C# like role.
Didn't went out the same way as with J++, unfortunately.
I'm a happy user of my second Tuxedo laptop after using the first for over 7 years, repairing several parts. I found their support very responsive and spare parts affordable. Your points are valid though. If you don't like their custom stuff, the device also works fine with a stock Linux install (Ubuntu in my case).
They're also the only OEM that replied to me when I was trying to reverse engineer a similar laptop to theirs. I think that alone should put them into a league of their own. Only two companies have ever properly replied to me when I asked about source code or hardware documentation: one is a chinese company, the other is Tuxedo.
Frankly it's bizarre that a Linux focused vendor thinks it's better to keep their device drivers outside of the kernel. Why would I buy a rebadged Clevo laptop from Tuxedo where I'm stuck either running their special Tuxedo distro or fiddling around with compiling kernel modules on other distros, when I could buy a much better laptop for the same price from a vendor who doesn't even advertise Linux support and get full out of the box hardware support on any distro I choose?
I bought a Tuxedo machine. While the situation is not perfect (I had to install driver packages on Fedora), everything works perfectly - including standby.
My last machine was a Thinkpad, and I never got it to work nearly as well. Standby mostly didn't work and when docking it, external screens would be arranged incorrectly unless I rebooted. USB ports also did not activate when docked, so I had a script for resetting the USB devices. Sometimes a new kernel version would come along and cause it to start freezing.
I did check out other laptops before buying the tuxedo (t14s g6 amd, zenbook s14), but according to the information available at the time, those machines had lots of issues. They were also more expensive.
Therefore I'm very curious about which laptop that you think is both better and cheaper than tuxedo, and has full hardware support out of the box?
I have a tuxedo 14" i7-12700H with 3050. And it is terrible. Specs are nice, price was hefty, but in the end it does not deliver. Battery is horrible, charging is disruptive, power budget is not enough. All stems from the nvidia card that I paid serious bucks to get included but it makes a decent laptop into a very bad one as the power delivery system just does not seem to be able to cope with it.
Anyway I would go with FRAMEWORK there. Sadly they did not deliver to my address when I was in the market, but now they do.
Hopefully latest Tuxedo does have better hardware support? Mine has problems with charging, usb-c charging is even worse (slow charge normal performance or ok charge and 5W throttling which makes all cores go at 1GHz), battery saving feature that hides 10% of battery capacity in firmware etc. They also stopped delivering any firmware updates after a few months.
The laptop 3050 card is the worst piece of computer hardware I've ever owned. Literally just heats up the laptop and still delivers shit performance.
I've got an MSI laptop and I've settled on simply never using the Nvidia card (prime-select iGPU only). The integrated graphics have access to 16gb of ram (versus the Nvidia card's 4gb) and deliver better performance without the whole laptop hitting 100 degrees.
I have a Clevo-based laptop. Our experiences were similar. The nvidia dGPU offers terrible performance and doesn't do much besides heat up the laptop. I disabled mine via the firmware. The CPU reaches 90 degrees when given almost any sort of load. It quickly thermal throttles itself down to uselessness despite three loud fans. I often have to use systemd shells with CPU quotas to manage this.
I hope the Asahi Linux project succeeds so I can buy the fabled Apple silicon laptops just to run Linux on them.
Interestingly enough my clevo (from tuxedo) does not have a gpu switch in firmware...
Which model is yours? Mine is a PA70ES.
I just double checked the firmware setup and it seems I was misremembering things. There's a toggle between "DISCRETE" and "MSHybrid" which means dGPU only and hybrid iGPU + dGPU graphics. I use it in MSHybrid mode with nouveau drivers. This keeps the dGPU in the lowest possible power mode.
It still wastes around 7-15 W doing pretty much nothing according to my monitoring script. That's the entire power budget of a single board computer like the Latte Panda Mu.
Which thinkpad was the one you had so many issues with, and which dock? I’ve had a few issues with my caldigit ts3 and ryzen 7840 p14s thinkpad but on the whole everything works pretty well. Worst issue has been a dumb regression with the Qualcomm ath12k firmware that wasn’t backed out for months.
I have the same thinkpad as working computer and InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 9 with 8845 as home computer. Lenovo has better upstream linux support but I was able to make both work without issues. I use debian testing/unstable.
Lenovo pros:
- better case
- better keyboard
Tuxedo pros:
- significantly cheaper price
- two fan setup enables faster performace (it is stable with 90W power consumption)
- almost twice as long battery life (tuxedo has bigger batery with similar weight and size)
- two nvme slots
If you want more powerful notebook with slightly worse build quality, tuxedo is good choice.
I think it was Tuxedo that accidentally ended up with GPLv3 drivers and no ability to relicense them.
Which means they can't be upstreamed because GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 (for the same reason CDDLv1.0 is considered incompatible).
They either need to track every copyright from the contractors (who AFAIK didn't sign over licensing to Tuxedo) to relicense the code, or write drivers again from scratch.
That was a problem at some point, but I think most of the GPL3-to-GPL2-relicense-issues have been solved by now?
Only as of 8 months ago, honestly surprised they even managed at all.
> If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
That is unfortunate. I hoped they were more like System76.
Having to use their specific drivers is a bit annoying, but I honestly prefer that over drivers that dont work or dont exist at all. I really hope they can bring their stuff upstream at one point, but I can't deny that using their laptops hasn't been good experiences.
So Qualcomm continues its Qualcomm behavior.
> If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
> It's so bad, volunteers created an alternative.
Years ago I wrote my own Linux user space driver for the keyboard on my Clevo based laptop. The Clevo application was so terrible I reverse engineered it and made my own Linux free software replacement.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
It seems some Tuxedo laptops have the same keyboard. Maybe Tuxedo users will find it useful.
I think it's great that a company tries to support ARM Linux and brings what looks to me like a Linux first ARM Laptop.
The first link does not mention blacklisting, just resolving a license compatibility issue.
"The patches check for the gxtp7380, ite_8291, ite_8291_lb, ite_8297, ite_829x, stk8321, tuxedo_compatibility_check, tuxedo_io, tuxedo_nb02_nvidia_power_ctrl, tuxedo_nb04_keyboard, tuxedo_nb04_wmi_ab, tuxedo_nb04_wmi_bs, tuxedo_nb04_sensors, tuxedo_nb04_power_profiles, tuxedo_nb04_kbd_backlight, tuxedo_nb05_keyboard, tuxedo_nb05_kbd_backlight, tuxedo_nb05_power_profiles, tuxedo_nb05_ec, tuxedo_nb05_sensors, tuxedo_nb05_fan_control, tuxi_acpi, tuxedo_tuxi_fan_control, clevo_wmi, tuxedo_keyboard, clevo_acpi, and uniwill_wmi kernel modules and will taint if they are present."
That's not what I would describe as "resolving a license compatibility issue"
> ite_829x
Huh, so Tuxedo developed their own ITE 829x kernel driver.
I have a Clevo based laptop, similar to the ones they sell. Years ago I reverse engineered the keyboard's features and wrote a user space driver.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
I interacted with Tuxedo quite a few times back then while I was figuring this stuff out. They even sent me source code for a pre-release version of their Electron app. It didn't help much in the end but they proved to be much nicer and more responsive than other manufacturers and even Clevo itself.
Wish they'd emailed me about their driver. I could have helped develop it, especially if they had given me documentation.
I briefly explored the idea of turning it into a kernel module and contributing it to the kernel. While reading Linux driver source code, some comments gave me the impression they'd prefer code remained in user space if possible. Since I already had a working user space driver, I decided not to contribute it.
I wrote the above program because Clevo's app was Windows only and so aggravating to use it defies description. Looks like Tuxedo ran into the same problem with their Electron app, if the complaints in this thread are any indication... Déjà vu.
I would describe it as exactly "resolving a license compatibility issue". Taint in linux kernel refers to marking this kernel as not supported, which often just means not purely GPLv2 compatible anymore. Proprietary AMD and nVidia drivers also cause taints. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/118117/251582
Yeah, the person you're responding to is taking "taint" to mean a literal ban situation; versus the very real status that exists in Linux Kernel development.
"TAINTing" a driver/code doesn't mean it's blacklisted, it means it can't be upstreamed into the GPL codebase. It means that if you build a Kernel with it, it's no longer considered OSS-friendly.
There are plenty of legitimate and viable codebases that use TAINTed kernels. The DoD, various government entities around the world, some commercial interests, etc.
It is, specifically because Tuxedo licensed their modules as GPLv3, instead of GPLv2 (the module license declaration only has 'GPL', to make this confusing), causing a mild license compatibility issue, and since they've had external contributions, it's not so easy for them to fix it. And it's not a ban, just a flag that gets set.
Very informative, thank you. I was about to buy one of their products but this made me pause.
What you think would be the alternative in Europe ?
Basically the same things happened to my tuxedo also. With the addition of having to change batteries once a year, because it would drop to half it's factory charge, which wasn't really sufficient. I also gave up on them when they wanted so much money for a screen change (which died after about 3-4 years).
I've replaced it with the new framework 13 inch, which so far works well, but I've only had it for 4-5 months. ( well, but not perfect, because the new AMD AI CPU has issues with suspend on linux)
That's a shame, I got a 13 w/ the previous non-AI AMD 7 7840U in April, and it's been rock-solid running Pop_OS. I wondered at the time if I should have waited for the newer CPUs...
at least with framework you know exactly how much the replacement parts will cost ahead of time.
> issues with suspend on linux
Oh? I'd seriously considered buying the 13 w/this AMD CPU and I guess I naively thought it would be ideal. What sort of problems with suspend are you seeing?
I have a Zephyrus G16 with a 370 and can confirm it would fail to sleep on Linux 6.12.
Upgraded to 6.15 and sleep seems to work well now.
I use NixOS
I have a T14 Gen 5 AMD. No issues with suspend/resume at all. NixOS, kernel 6.12. The Ryzen AI APUs are fairly new, so it may take a few months for things to settle.
I haven't spent time investigating if my specific setup is the problem, or an actual bug in the drivers, but after I resume from suspend, the btrfs root fs is in a read-only state.
The only solution is to reboot/shutdown, but it takes a long time and there are some scary fs checks running. Luckily no lost data so far. Currently I'm just shutting down the machine every time because it the boot times are quite fast.
If you use Ubuntu or something similar, it literally takes years for kernel fixes to trickle down. Its quite unfortunate
Slimbook (Spanish OEM) basically sells the same ODM designs as Tuxedo and is an option. They have a few cobranded (KDE etc) versions that contribute to the development teams.
Otherwise at this point I believe the Framework laptops have pretty solid Linux support and is a good option if you're ok w/ so-so battery life.
There is StarLab https://starlabs.systems although they don’t make ARM laptops if that’s what you are asking for.
While StarLabs has shipped products before, I'd be careful with them. That StarFighter laptop was supposed to ship years ago, and I don't think any have been delivered yet. Here's a Reddit thread [1] from three years ago saying delivery would be in a few months.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/yjuahx/star_...
Don’t bother with these. In my eyes the gold standard for Linux laptops is Framework or Lenovo.
To me, it's System76.
Clearly Framework is not supporting Linux if there are issues with suspend.
Works on my machine.
The problem with System76 is that Lenovo exists. There isn’t much of a real reason to buy a “standard laptop” like system76 over a higher volume OEM like Lenovo.
With Framework you’re at least getting the extreme modularity and upgradeability as a major differentiator.
But with System76 you’re essentially getting a regular laptop that you could get from any other major brand. You’ll have an easier time getting parts with Lenovo.
Unfortunately I don't know about a good alternative from Europe. I'd probably get a Framework if my device stops working. They seem to work hard at upstreaming things and use Linux standards. They also connected with the GNOME foundation, so there might be some collaboration in the future
https://entroware.com from the UK gets mentioned here and there, but I think they don't do any software development at all, and only repackage OEM laptops.
I am running a tuxedo since 6 years and I am still happy with it. Had to use their support once to replace the cooling assembly because one of the fan bearings started to ger noisy after 5 years of 24/7 use, the replacement was 100 Euros for the whole copper+heatpipe+two fan assembly. The machine is still outperforming many other machines that exist today and the sceeen is one of the best I have seen (OLED).
Software side was smooth sailing as well.
NovaCustom had a discussion on here recently and uses dasharo coreboot.
You are right that tuxedo has some issues. But also take into account price of their notebooks. Even lenovo, hp, dell etc. are not without issues in the similar price category. I take it as cheap HW for advanced users.
But you are right that not having drivers upstream is really strange decision.
Seconded. Stay away from Tuxedo. You get better hardware support with many other vendors.
Which ones? System76 presumably, but do you get better support from any of the mainstream vendors?
There are parts in the industry that are not meant for end users. I service copiers and printers. The fixing unit is not meant to be installed by a handyman, thats why you dont get to buy it. You can cook yourself, it works with 230V.... Toner and drum unit are sold to customers.
Respectfully, nothing about that applies to a laptop. This has been well proven over the years, that with good forethought and making parts available laptops can be highly repairable.
The display unit is nothing an enduser should replace. Does every user know how to handle the delicate display and how to carefully install the LVDS cable? In most modern cars you cant replace the windscreen with cameras, heating wires in your backyard without the calibration software. You can try it, but you will fail.
Don’t be ridiculous. I replaced screens on (old) Thinkpads and a Framework and it’s literally a 5 min job, no experience needed. Both have excellent repair documentation. With Framework you can replace any component in that time frame. No, really. Some years ago, with Thinkpads you didn’t even have to disassemble the machine for many components… eg. you pressed a button and the lappy ejected the hard drive.
I know quite a few non-techies who replaced their phone screens themselves. That’s been unexpected and impressive to me. Honestly, you can get unlucky, but in my experience, electronic components are surprisingly resistant to abuse.
Sure, if everything is soldered or glued down it‘s intentionally hard to self-service, but that’s also down to your consumer choices. There is nothing inherently unserviceable.
Take a look at the framework laptop for how accessible replacing parts on a laptop can be if you put even a little bit of effort into it. Most people are entirely capable of the manual dexterity, they just lack clear instructions, or things artificially require specialized equipment and software and more fiddly, difficult, and risky steps because it's either not a priority or it's actively a priority to discourage it.
So what you are saying, is that it is all designed to be impossible to fix without special equipment and exquisite motor skills?
Displays are absolutely end user repairable if the end user has experience. Allowing an end user to perform repairs shouldn't mean the repair should be doable by every single end-user.
If that was the case we wouldn't be allowed to replace AA batteries.
230VAC mains electrical fittings are openly sold in DIY shops in every country in the European Union without mass-cookings occurring as a result. This reeks of utterly unearned elitism.
Yep. I think pretty much every youngster gets some basic education (besides getting years of physics in high-school): disarm the group/fuse, double check with a power tester, make sure you are not causing any shorts. I don't know anyone who calls an electrician for replacing a light fitting, a power outlet, or light switches.
Besides that some European countries have required for decades that new houses/apartment have central residual-current circuit breakers for the whole house (unlike the US where as far as I understand they are only required in certain areas and are often in the socket and not centralized).
Can’t say I got any particular education, but honestly knowing it’s quite dangerous kinda pushes you in the right direction, if you’re not super dim, too. And usually you can call a parent or someone who knows what’s up, to get the instructions or help the first time.
I do that work almost every day. What if the untalented handyman crunches a live cable and the metallic frame is on fire? You can repair how and what you want, its your house and children.
>You can repair how and what you want, its your house and children.
They cannot.
>The device is also not repairable at all. I had an issue with my screen and they gave me a quote of ~200€+ to repair it. I'm sure I could fix it myself for a lot less, but no parts are available and no instructions.
If the metallic frame is on fire and the circuit breaker doesn't trigger when you turn on, then the manufacturer has some explaining to do.
Screw in a light bulb and you work with 230V and we still allow people to screw in their own light bulbs
What are the 5 safety guidelines?
Don't know, I just make sure there is no power.
"230VAC is dangerous, therefore it makes sense you cannot purchase a 12VDC laptop screen to install yourself"
Ever heard of the old displays with an inverter that produced around 700V? Can zap grandpa into the coffin... THats why they did not sell it to customers.
Everybody obviously works on a powered on laptop, with fully charged capacitors. With those capacitor delivering at leat 100mA to your heart for good measure.
It's like when people work on their car, they do it at highway speed, using a nacelle precariously balanced under the car, with the front wheels propped up on dollies for access.
And I'm sure that continuing that tradition into the laptop LCD era is similarly due to safety and not profit.
> Ever heard of the old displays with an inverter that produced around 700V?
...Are we talking about CRTs from like 20 years ago? What does that have to do with laptops?
Two of the reasons I eventually gave up on Desktop Linux, were virtualization getting good enough for just keep using Windows instead, back in the day with VMware Workstation and Virtual Box, nowadays with WSL (macOS is anyway UNIX enough for me to care otherwise).
And exactly the same experience with OEM vendors that were supposed to be Linux friendly, on my case the whole netbooks effort, where graphics, video decoding and wlan never worked as well on Windows, even though they were supposed to.
Dell XPS also had their issues for something that was supposed to be Canonical certified as running GNU/Linux properly.
It seems Android, ChromeOS and WebOS are the only ones where OEMs actually care to make it work properly, naturally the cloud and IoT vendors with their custom distros as well.
I've been running Linux on my laptop and on my workstation since the 90's. Still using it as my main driver. Fedora Kinoite is my distro of choice, and Lenovo AMD Thinkpad T14s the laptop. Everything works flawless, and it's still pretty fast even though it's two years old already.
And I do not miss at all the Microsoft bullsh*t on tracking and advertising. Or the general sluggishness of Windows.
I used to be quite cynical about these posts. I used Linux as my main desktop from 1994-2007 and switched to Mac then. I would periodically try on laptops Linux again, but there were always things broken in bad ways.
Early this year I bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD. In contrast to when I had a T14 Gen 1 AMD early 2020s, everything just works. All the hardware works, suspend/resume works, all the hardware comes up after a resume, etc.
Lately I have been using my ThinkPad much more than my MacBook Pro. NixOS is a superpower to me and having NixOS on a laptop is living the dream.
I’ve used it from probably… 2010 or so, to now. I recall some stuff like WiFi being vaguely annoying in the beginning. But, things seemed to get pretty good post 2015.
You were here for the really hard stuff, and missed the beginning of the good times, I think. Unlucky! Oh well. Welcome back!
I did use a Ryzen Linux desktop from ~2018-2020 besides a MacBook, but Apple Silicon was so insanely good when it was introduced that I went back fully back to Mac on the desktop. But Ryzen mobile APUs have been catching up.
I have also used headless Linux machines throughout my Mac vacation :).
With regards to the hard stuff. 1994-2007 was from my 12th to my 25th, basically overlapping with when I was a high school/university student. So, plenty of time and not enough money for a Mac or some commercial UNIX system. That period was also super exciting, especially up till the dotcom crash a lot of people thought that Linux was going to take over the desktop (anyone remember Corel Linux and even WordPerfect on Linux?). Linux did take over, but in different ways than we imagined, the server was kinda expected after the mid-nineties, but Android not.
The only problem with this approach is that I don't want to use Apple's software, or rely on a commercial operating system. The hardware is great, but not so much the software.
> NixOS is a superpower to me
Can you expand on this? Just curious what is the main value-add you are getting from NixOS in particular?
- Fully declarative. I can bring up a system in 5-10 minutes (depending on internet speed) and the system configuration is exactly as any other system.
- Great modules for programs/services in NixOS and home manager. So I typically do not have to figure out what configuration format something uses. Most common options are exposed as module options and for options that are not exposed, it's often possible to write the configuration in Nix (or worst case a string that gets added to the configuration). I can access the documentation of all modules with a simple _man configuration.nix_ or `man home-configuration.nix`.
- I can override arbitrary packages with custom build options, etc. I don't have to maintain separate .spec/rules files or anything. I can just put a somePackage.override/overrideAttrs somewhere in my system configuration and the package customizations are there with my system configuration and always get built with the system.
- Packaging something to hook it up in my system is low-effort. nixpkgs is the largest distribution package set (according to repology). But sometimes something is missing or I want to add some of my own projects as packages, unless it's some insanely bad proprietary application, I can do it in a few minutes.
- Atomic updates/rollbacks.
- Ad-hoc or project-specific development shells (though that is more Nix than NixOS).
I know that the learning curve can be steep, but once you really get Nix and NixOS, it's kinda like being the master of the universe, erm, I mean your systems.
I don't think anybody ever sold nixos that good to me before.
I might try it again. Last time I really did not like that any minute config change would take 15s to apply.
But the biggest issue for me, is that right now I have a good enough solution, that allows for config file update from applications. I have a small git repo, with one shell script, that symlinks config files, and even generates a few. And so backing up the latest config changes from KDE, freecad, etc, is a git add & commit away. I have another shell script to setup the base Ubuntu the way I want. And my data is replicated via syncthing.
NixOS gives you the ability to define your system declaratively, upgrade or tweak without fear of breaking anything, and the ability to launch shells with arbitrary and well defined sets of dependencies.
Can attest - Thinkpads and Linux go great together. Used for 2 years, then was forced into Windows crap by corporate policy. No, WSL is not the same.
10+ years of T440s here. Most of the time a Fedora base. Both batteries at 50% health but the only thing that really is noticeable over the years is the missing hardware for todays video codecs.
I know, there are dozens on Linux forums, every time I was searching for workarounds.
Also it isn't as if I haven't subscribed to Linux Journal during its whole lifetime, or LWN, or even used to write M$ on email signatures and Usenet messages, for that matter.
Signed someone that knows Linux since kernel 1.0.9, yet has better things to do than making it work.
It's funny, for me it's just like you said but with the commercial offerings. I just can't get them to work as I want, like with Linux. To each of its own, but I doubt I'm the only one sharing this issue. I don't have time to deal issues with macOS or Windows, I have work to do...
This os why I only buy laptops that ship with Linux, with support you can call to get broken things fixed.
Slapping Linux on a Windows box is a mug's game
You mean like I did in the past with Dell XPS, and Asus netbooks?
This kind of discussions are so repetitive.
Before the Tuxedo, I used an old Lenovo. I didn't check before if it works well with Linux, but it worked flawlessly. I am so used to devices working well and not having to think much about drivers. That's probably why I am disappointed by Tuxedo. They market themselves to Linux users but until recently they did not emphasize upstreaming and embracing standards.
What I love about Lenovo besides PSRef and all the maintenance/repair manuals (with part numbers, so that you know what to get if something needs to be replaced), etc. is that they often certify laptops for Linux.
They also seem to really care about supporting Linux. E.g. WWAN modems need proprietrary unlock procedures these days thanks to the FCC [1]. Most vendors would shrug and say 'sorry, we only support Windows', Lenovo has a repo with Linux support for all the modems that ThinkPads support (you can only use supported modems, because the FCC apparently only certifies laptop/modem combinations, not individual modems):
https://github.com/lenovo/lenovo-wwan-unlock
[1] https://modemmanager.org/docs/modemmanager/fcc-unlock/
I ran a Dell XPS (not even the Canonical certified version) for a few years at a past job, and everything worked pretty well under Ubuntu. But it's always a matter of which exact hardware combination has mainstream support, and if the version you get doesn't e.g. have a shitty WiFi chip with bad support.
Yes. This is why I rather check Linux support od chips in a machine that I am planning to buy. Not that much work but you will not get unpleasant surprise when Wi-Fi do not work.
Funny to read replies to your comment. One can be sure that on HN for every single critical comment about Linux viability one gets multiple responses claiming that Linux is perfect and without issues.
Inb4: I have used Linux exclusively from 2019 to 2024. It wasn't that bad but it wasn't flawless. At least once per month I met some issue that took few hours to solve. Currently on Win11, zero problems (yes, I am using pirated LTSC IoT version, how did you know?)
No system is without issues. We used ThunderBolt docks that worked perfectly with macOS, until one major release they became a hell to use because Apple broke something (which manifested as a display not coming back after resume, requiring several plugs/unplugs).
As everyone knows, Windows has its own fair share of issues. The first is that it is not a Unix :).
Lol. I'm unplugging and re plugging my HDMI display for like 3 years now. Thanks Apple for being so stupid that you can't even get external displays to work properly
In this case it turns out they got… one comment that was strongly pro-Linux, one that mentioned they didn’t have trouble but only as an aside before going on to discuss Tuxedo, and one that was softly positive but acknowledged the trouble of checking hardware beforehand.
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
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 machines have no touchpad or touchscreen support. Listing them as "supported" requires a creative interpretation of the term.
They don't say everything works they say kernel works on those laptops.
I'd say "boots" would be more appropriate.
between booting and being able to everything except supporting non existent proprietary drivers for touchpad and screen from Microsoft is quite a difference.
Works for me - those are the first things I turn off!
I'm waiting for this. I like low powered laptops as more of a terminal. I dont want the apple ecosystem, but I'm getting really tired of windows, high end chromebooks kinda disappeared, I have Linux servers at home. Do I have to wait much longer?
An alternative that is available right now is to get an M1/M2 MacBook Air and run Asahi Linux on it. The older models are pretty cheap, but still quite fast. There are some missing features, but it runs really well. I've been using it as my home driver for over a year and it's really solid.
I am so tempted. Is battery life good with Asahi?
It's unfortunately not (yet) as good as in MacOS, but acceptable.
I have a think pad I use this way. Super light, battery lasts forever but it’s super low powered. However, I use Tailscale to connect to my beefy desktop at home with ssh/tmux and Zed remote editing. It’s perfect.
A laptop with a recent ryzen processor and a large battery goes a long way already. It is not as good as my m1 macbook but it is really good
If you can avoid eye rolling at the stupid name, the new Ryzen AI lineup (codename strix point) is really, really good. Very efficient.
OK interesting. I'm not interested in AI stuff, but looks like they are lower power too which is what I want.
Performance per watt is not far at all from M4. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 actually beats a M4 Max in e.g. Passmark per Watt (652 vs 625), and it's not much behind in other benchmarks.
With some tweaks, it can also be silent. Good ThinkPads are not far from the user experience delivered by the latest MacBooks, and they have the advantage of running free software and x86_64.
> the current Linux Kernel 6.15 already supports many commercial laptops: Lenovo Yoga 7x, Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, Dell XPS 13, Asus Vivobook S15, HP Omnibook x14, Microsoft Surface 13/15
Has anybody had any first-hand experience with Linux on such laptops?
I run Linux on a Thinkpad T13s, with the previous generation of Snapdragon CPUs. It runs great - quick, excellent battery life and very stable. Installation is a bit obnoxious, but nothing a modestly seasoned Linux veteran can't handle.
Completely agree with this. Ubuntu installs from the standard ARM installer on the X13s and openSuse Tumbleweed needs a litte help at the start but then runs great.
It looks like the Snapdragon X gets quite a lot of support now and end of the year or earlier next year it should be quite useable for most.
When the Snapdragon X laptops came out they where all over 1000$ and I completely understand that the number of Linux kernel enthusiasts to set things up would initially be limited.
Used prices come down now and that will also help.
I have one of those too. Found a nice 32gb spec one on eBay for a good price. Last I tried Ubuntu the main issues were the speakers were very quiet and usb-c display out didn't work.
Alt DP works fine, the current limitation is that it can't do 4k@60hz because it's using only two DP lanes due to a driver limitation.
did you mean Thinkpad x13s?
Yes, thanks for the correction. It was really early when I replied!
When you say "excellent battery life" .. can you be more specific?
Not the original commentator. With Linux I think battery life is ok, but not more. I get about 8h out of it. My battery shows 92% capacity, so there might be a bit more in it.
As someone with a Yoga 7x .. I'm still waiting. It's not fully supported.
The issue is drivers for peripherals and wifi.
I think the GPU is now supported.
It's been a long wait, mostly due to Qualcomm as I understand.
I was down-voted by saying back then (snapdragon x elite release date) that Qualcomm has no priority in making Linux a first class platform. Qualcomm does what Qualcomm does. I won't purchase a laptop which has no known Linux support.
You can however, put Ubunutu no problem on the Ryzen versions.
https://github.com/jrandiny/yoga-slim7-ubuntu
I have an XPS 13. It does run linux, but so does every other laptop with an x86 chipset. It's horrible in pretty much every other way though. The battery, GPU fan, and left USB-C port failed successively shortly after the warranty was up.
Surface Pro X here, the support is meh (see https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/7) but good enough to use it casually as a second computer.
In my case the biggest drawback is not being able to use an external screen via HDMI and the sound support (although you can workaround that with BT). Let's not talk about widevine, I managed to eventually get it to work but it was very painful.
If we get full audio support and solve some of the widevine issues, this can easily become a daily driver for when I'm traveling or giving presentations.
Flawless on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 and on an HP EliteBook G6.
They are talking about Snapdragon equipped laptops.
Whoops, indeed, sorry!
Last I checked power management didn't work so they would run hot and burn through your battery. So unless there is full software support for hardware that makes laptops a portable computer, it's just not a practical solution for me.
Tho, I really want this to happen. As far as I've tested on Volterra (ms dev kit 2023), linux has a lot going right for it. there is a ton of ARM64 packages, and drivers just work (e.g. I had to wait so long for Wacom to release WoA drivers while it worked out the box with ARM64 linux builds). the potential is there and it's great.
On a last note, not being able to ship necessary firmware and relying on a WoA boot drive still sucks.
Poor power management has always been the last bastion keeping me from using Linux in certain machines. My desktop won’t sleep or wake up at all (or it will wake but show a grey screen and glitch out) on any distro I’ve tried. Every time I use it on a laptop the battery life is terrible. Makes me sad.
Power mgmt has worked very well on our old Dell precision that came with Linux, and two newer Frameworks (1 Intel, 1 AMD). Basically perfect for over a decade.
Battery life could be a bit better but is decent.
I'm waiting for Android Virtualization Framework to run a full Linux distro on my smartphone with portable monitor (glasses). Already using Termux but AVF is hopefully much more performant. Maybe the Samsung S26 Ultra will have full support. I might ditch my miniPC if this works out.
I've been playing with it[0] - it still has a few rough edges. It's rather slow to start up compared to firing up a VM in virt-manager, and when you shut it down you must wait for it to finish shutting down before trying to restart it.
Woe to you if Debian pushes a systemd update. It took repeated incantations with apt to get that update to take, because updating systemd would crash the VM Every. Damn. Time.
[0] The current console-only incarnation.
Thanks for sharing. I hope with Android 16 and Samsung implementing AVF for DeX these issues will be ironed out.
> Already using Termux but AVF is hopefully much more performant.
I'm cautiously optimistic about AVF, but I don't see why it would have any better performance than native code running directly on the host system?
I thought AVF has hardware virtualization where proot is user-space.
Oh, sorry, I missed that you meant running another distro under termux. Yes, that probably will be faster, I agree. (I thought we were talking about native termux, which doesn't have the proot perf hit)
I'm waiting for one of the headset vendors to support IMU-based HID mouse cursor control in hardware, with the same end goal in mind. In the meantime I'm stuck on amd64 with my little libinput driver[0].
[0]: https://github.com/boomskats/woahland
How long can work on one of these for?
I find it extremely comfortable. Considerably moreso than with my desk and monitor setup. I'm long sighted and the projection distance means I don't need glasses to see, and they don't get overly hot (nothing compared to a VR headset). Most significantly though, I can change the position of my head whenever I want without changing what I'm looking at, which makes a difference for my neck comfort, posture, etc.
To answer your question directly, I've done multiple 2-3 hour sessions at a time without taking the glasses off and have done 10+ hour days in them when away from home. At home I typically tend to use them for a couple of hours in the afternoons when I'm tired and more willing to sacrifice screen real estate for comfort.
The detail isn't the same and you have to plan your screen layout a bit (i.e. looking at code near the edges of the screen is annoying). But I think they're the future - a much bigger deal than VR or AR.
Awesome, I may try this out. I have similar eye issues and over the last couple years its actually been almost impossible for me to look at monitors in the afternoon after my eyes have fatigued.
Full Linux distro already works fine on my Librem 5, without unnecessary, costly virtualization.
It's a very interesting project, but I don't think I'm ready to let go of all my Android apps.
On those rare occasions that I need to launch an Android app (such as my banking app), I run it in Waydroid.
That won't work with apps that require Play Store Integrity, right?
I prefer to switch bank when they force me to support American megacorps.
Likely won't, but I never had to use those.
It's not precisely a laptop, but I have an augmented reality cyberdeck using XReal AR glasses running into a battery powered Raspberry Pi 5 that I built, which runs pretty well. I feel like the Pis have long been a canary in the coalmine for Linux and ARM (first ARMHF and now ARM64) support.
That sounds… awesome! I want one; links to a part list or anything?
It's easy to find the company (https://www.xreal.com/us/air/) but they sell different models, and I'd be interested in gp's model and user experience.
If it's not fully supported and has major roadbumps, which it has, it is not supported. I don't know why companies take linux users as fools that'll accept anything thrown at them. Until lenovo can get their shit together and make a respectable laptop with 12h+ battery life, good build quality and a decent enough screen even on the worst configs, im not getting it
Since 2019 there is also the ARM64 MNT Reform Laptop https://mntre.com/reform.html
A little more context : in june 2024 at Computex, Tuxedo announced a possible christmas 2024 release [1]. A Qualcomm/Tuxedo collaboration was expected but did not materialize [2].
[1] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-on-ARM-is-coming.t... [2] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/How-is-TUXEDOCOes-ARM-Not...
Do the Snapdragons implement TSO/Total Store Order like the Apple chips to allow Rosetta 2 like x86 compatibility?
No. But what x86/x64 support that is available on Windows/Linux isn't as slow as you might think.
Do you have any data or reviews to link for that?
I'd really like to replace my old Thinkpad with a long-running, lightweight Linux laptop that can also do some gaming on the side (think Witcher 3 on good settings) but Snapdragon has not lived up to the hype AFAIK.
But big thumbs up to all the Linux devs that are working on improving the situation!
Not having the special hardware you are referring to means that the transpiled binaries have more fences than might be strictly necessary, which maybe gives a 5-10% performance hit depending on the use case?
Any word on a compibily layer project for x86/64 like Rosetta? Seems like an important thing to have imo.
The article mentions an emulator, but it seemed to be for running games.
I also heard MS had something similar in their arm dev kit, but haven't looked much into it.
It's not just for games. FEX-EMU is used here alongside Wine/Proton to run games but it'll also run the x64 version of other things. There's other layers like Box64 that do the same thing. For Linux, a lot of the software traditionally found in repos already has an ARM version and it's not as necessary. On Windows on ARM sometimes the only way to get an ARM native version is to run the Linux version under WSL.
Windows on ARM has allowed running x86 code from launch with Windows 10 and x64 code since Windows 11.
There is Box86/box64/box32. A bit confusing but it's box86 for x86 > ARM32. Box64 for x86_64 > ARM64. And Box32 for x86 > ARM64.
I think they mention games because a lot of other software for Linux is generally open source. So a lot of times it's pretty easy to get an ARM build.
It also does a neat performance trick where it intercepts library calls and redirects them to native versions of the same library.
http://github.com/ptitSeb/box64
There's lots of responses but they miss the point. Rosetta let you run x86/64 apps without even knowing they were x86/64. Back when I ran Asahi, I searched far and wide, but Linux doesn't support that level of transparent integration. You always had to fuddle with the launch params.
Pedantic point, but Linux (the kernel) absolutely does. You can register an executable handler for amd64 binaries, and have Linux call that whenever one is invoked.
There is absolutely no user land infrastructure for using this in the way that Rosetta does on macOS, though. Feel free to contribute it!
You can run x86 steam games on asahi easily now. muvm makes it quite easy to run x86 binaries fairly transparently on arm.
qemu user mode does that
https://wiki.debian.org/QemuUserEmulation
Been daily driving an M1 for two years at this point; no complaints.
With a Linux distro on it?
Yes, with Asahi (Now a Fedora was Arch initially). Think the fingerprint reader still didn't work but not really tried. Also only one external monitor (or DisplayLink) but the screen, sound, battery life, performace all best any x86 I have used.
Asahi Fedora here, works good.
A Unix.
With applications.
And working webcam light and audio.
Does Linux arm64 run Windows x86 applications in Wine? I mean, I'd be surprised if it did, but I need that. Otherwise an arm64 Linux laptop is super tempting.
Yes, with Box86 and Box64 along with Wine.
well, Wine is not an emulator.
Will this enable plain Debian on tablets like the the Microsoft Surface?
That would be awesome!
Is there something like Rosetta for linux?
box64: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64
Looking forward to this, thanks.
This sound nice but I don't like the incompatibility with x86. Docker and many other things.
Yeah we need some trade off's. But for dev's & a lot of ops stuff I enjoy more x86 as it's de facto standard.
Docker works fine on arm. Docker has multi-arch image support and it works seamlessly if implemented correctly. Tons of docker images already support multi-arch. https://www.docker.com/blog/multi-arch-build-and-images-the-...
But tons of them also don't. And for those that don't, there are usually alternatives available, but they are just that tiny bit different. So while Docker works, there is extra effort needed to use it.
You can always use amd64 images with qemu-user if necessary.
I am fed up with the linux world. I run Ubuntu on a randomly selected Thinkpad, everything works, outta the box. Why should i buy a new laptop because it holds another cpu doing the exact workload? I cant code faster, cant talk faster with people and being productive 8hrs strait is just a lie. Since almost 10years i read about pre-installed devices, but i dont see them anywhere. Most companies dont have business linux apps and they wont be available, an armada of developers is busy bringing the light of the webcam functioning. Why not specialize in something else like software the entire world runs on like SAP or whatever? Its nice to spend a rainy day to compile your kernel...but the outcome?
Nobody is telling you to buy a new laptop. Same goes for software. If it's not for you then don't use it. It's all about choice. And the entire Linux ecosystem is not a single entity to "specialize on SAP or whatever". I suspect a large portion of SAP systems already run Linux anyway.
This sort of device is not really “the Linux world,” it is a company trying to provide Linux to people outside it; people who need pre-installs.
It is fine, and good of them to try, but if you don’t need it, you don’t need it.
You don't "have to" do anything, you can stay with the setup you're using right now just fine, I don't get the point of this post, you're fighting ghosts.
Or you could say they are "tilting at windmills".
> Why should i buy a new laptop because it holds another cpu doing the exact workload?
Long battery is pretty nice. And you don't have to be productive for 8 hours straight to feel the niceness.
Why not switch to Windows then? You'll of course have to chuck that perfectly finely working laptop when Windows 12 declares it obsolete, but such is life there.
I think you're confusing Microsoft and Apple. :-)
>Why should i buy a new laptop because it holds another cpu doing the exact workload?
Do you think that you are the center of the world and no product deserves to exist unless you have an immediate use for it?
I was pushing this into the marketing perspective. You are told what to buy...