On 2023-03-21 20:57 +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 01:21:04PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > > > Nowadays, many people report good support with Lenovo's high-range ARM > > system, the Thinkpad X13S. > It has a trackpoint! Killer feature. It seems to have decent > performance; the press says it compares favourably to Intel's mobile > offering in December 2021 for less power draw, even though... really > slower than Apple M1 (like 2× to 2.5×...). But if it actually works > like right now (while GNU/Linux on Apple Silicon is still very, very > rough), and again, it has a trackpoint. The X13s is nice hardware, but AIUI there are still various things that need upstreaming to the mainline kernel before everything works properly. The one major downside you do need to be aware of is that you cannot run VMs - the machine boots linux in EL1 instead of EL2 so a hypervisor cannot get control at the right level. There is a proprietary BIOS mechanism for Windows to get hypervisor authority so VMs work fine on Windows. This is Qualcomm's fault, but they don't want to fix it. Lenovo do, so probably/hopefully some solution will become available eventually, but right now you are knackered on this front. > I think I've decided :) Thanks for the pointer! If the above is not a problem for you then it is indeed nice hardware. Asahi linux on Apple M1 hardware is also viable. It's also very nice hardware (faster than the x13 I believe), and the bootloader is not crippled. But Apple do not co-operate at all so everything is reverse-engineered. Which means currently most stuff works but power management is significantly lacking. I have the july 2022 release and it runs debian very nicely indeed, but the machine doesn't sleep - I have to reboot every time. And I have no GPU acceleration, although it's more than fast enough for my purposes anyway, but I guess it's not power-efficient doing software rendering. I understand that both those things are fixed with the current release. https://asahilinux.org/blog/ Those two machines are the only currently available candidates for decent performance laptops, just as good as X86. There are also expensive server-grade machines, and a range other devices which make adequate computers. like the Pi4, and various rockchip, allwinner, marvell etc devices. Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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