8 ms·

What is it about it that makes it unsuited for anything serious? The way you describe it, the only thing it's not suited for is gaming, which is not generally r

by jdibs 10mo ago

What is it about it that makes it unsuited for anything serious? The way you describe it, the only thing it's not suited for is gaming, which is not generally regarded as serious. Many people including myself do serious work on a macbook, which is also ARM. What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?

znpy 10mo ago
> What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate? Everything else around the cpu. apple systems are entirely co-designed (cpu to work with the rest of the components and everything together to work with mac os). While i'd love to see macbook-level quality on other brands (looking at you, lenovo) tight hardware+software co-design (and co-development) yields much better results.
- NaomiLehman 10mo ago
  for this to happen we would need to see a second company that controls both the hardware and the software and that's not realistic, economically. You can't just jump into that space.
  - LeFantome 10mo ago
    You could argue that is exactly what Tuxedo is doing. In this case, they could not provide the end-user experience they wanted with this hardware so they moved on. System76 may be an even better example as they now control their software stack more deeply (COSMIC).
    - NaomiLehman 10mo ago
      when I say "control the software" what i mean is we need another company that can say "hey we are moving to architecture X because we think it's better" and within a year most developers rewrite their apps for the new arch - because it's worth it for them there needs to be a huge healthy ecosystem/economic incentive. it's all about the software for end users. I don't care what brand it is or OS and how much it costs. I want to have the most polished software and I want to have it on release day. Right now, it's Apple. Microsoft tries to do this but is held back by the need for backward compatibility (enterprise adoption), and Google cannot do this because of Android fragmentation. I don't think anyone is even near to try this with Linux.
      - LeFantome 10mo ago
        Open Source has a massive advantage here. Almost everything on regular Fedora works on Ashai Fedora out of the box on Apple Silicon. You can get a full Ubuntu distribution for RISC-V with tens of thousands of packages working today. Many Linux users would have little trouble changing architectures. For Linux, the issue is booting and drivers. What you say is true for proprietary software of course. But there is FEX to run x86 software on ARM and Felix86 to run it on RISC-V. These work like Rosetta. Many Windows games run this way for example. The majority of Android apps ship as Dalvik bytecode and should not care about the arch. Anything using native code is going to require porting though. That includes many games I imagine.
        NaomiLehman 10mo ago
        we are both right in different scopes but the context of the thread is the cancellation of an ARM notebook
  - sofixa 10mo ago
    Microsoft with their Surface line? They don't control every part of the hardware, but neither did Apple control even the majority before the M series.
- jeroenhd 10mo ago
  I get the lacking Linux support, but what about Windows? Most serious work happens on Windows and their SoCs seem to have much better support there. Apple's hardware+software design combo is nice for things like power efficiency, but so in my experience so far, a Macbook and a similarly priced Windows laptop seems to be about equal in terms of weird OS bugs and actually getting work done.
  - rootnod3 10mo ago
    I run an old T480 with FreeBSD and get about 17 hours of battery out of it. Sure, it’s a bit thicker but gets the job done as a daily driver.
    - speakspokespok 10mo ago
      There is literally no way. Spill the beans!
      - rjsteixeira 10mo ago
        Probably has the extra big battery. Thinkpads have options for different sized batteries.
        StillBored 10mo ago
        Or they just got one of the 'good' models and tuned linux a bit. I have a couple lenovo's and its hit/miss, but my 'good' machine has an AMD which after a bit of tuning idles with the screen on at 2-3W, and with light editing/browsing/etc is about 5W. With the 72Wh battery that is >14h, maybe over 20 if I was just reading documentation. Of course its only 4-5 if i'm running a lot of heavy compile/VMs unless I throttle them, in which case its easy over 8h. One of my 'bad' machines is more like 10-100W and i'm lucky to get two hours. Smaller efficient CPU + low power sleep + not a lot of background activity + big battery = very long run times.
        KerbalNo15 10mo ago
- jorvi 10mo ago
  Microsoft is pushing hard for UEFI + ACPI support on PC ARM boards. I believe the Snapdragon X2 is supposed to support it. That still leaves the usual UEFI + ACPI quirks Linux has had to deal with for aeons, but it is much more manageable than (non-firmware) DeviceTree. The dream of course would be an opensource HAL (which UEFI and ACPI effectively are). I remember that certain Asus laptops had a microstutter due to a non-timed loop doing an insane amount of polling. Someone debugged it with reverse engineering, posted it on GitHub, and it still took Asus more than a year to respond to it and fix it, only after it blew up on social media (including here). With an opensource HAL, the community could have introduced a fix in the HAL overnight.

by jdibs 10mo ago

znpy 10mo ago

> What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate? Everything else around the cpu. apple systems are entirely co-designed (cpu to work with the rest of the components and everything together to work with mac os). While i'd love to see macbook-level quality on other brands (looking at you, lenovo) tight hardware+software co-design (and co-development) yields much better results.

NaomiLehman 10mo ago
for this to happen we would need to see a second company that controls both the hardware and the software and that's not realistic, economically. You can't just jump into that space.
- LeFantome 10mo ago
  You could argue that is exactly what Tuxedo is doing. In this case, they could not provide the end-user experience they wanted with this hardware so they moved on. System76 may be an even better example as they now control their software stack more deeply (COSMIC).
  - NaomiLehman 10mo ago
    when I say "control the software" what i mean is we need another company that can say "hey we are moving to architecture X because we think it's better" and within a year most developers rewrite their apps for the new arch - because it's worth it for them there needs to be a huge healthy ecosystem/economic incentive. it's all about the software for end users. I don't care what brand it is or OS and how much it costs. I want to have the most polished software and I want to have it on release day. Right now, it's Apple. Microsoft tries to do this but is held back by the need for backward compatibility (enterprise adoption), and Google cannot do this because of Android fragmentation. I don't think anyone is even near to try this with Linux.
    - LeFantome 10mo ago
      Open Source has a massive advantage here. Almost everything on regular Fedora works on Ashai Fedora out of the box on Apple Silicon. You can get a full Ubuntu distribution for RISC-V with tens of thousands of packages working today. Many Linux users would have little trouble changing architectures. For Linux, the issue is booting and drivers. What you say is true for proprietary software of course. But there is FEX to run x86 software on ARM and Felix86 to run it on RISC-V. These work like Rosetta. Many Windows games run this way for example. The majority of Android apps ship as Dalvik bytecode and should not care about the arch. Anything using native code is going to require porting though. That includes many games I imagine.
      - NaomiLehman 10mo ago
        we are both right in different scopes but the context of the thread is the cancellation of an ARM notebook
- sofixa 10mo ago
  Microsoft with their Surface line? They don't control every part of the hardware, but neither did Apple control even the majority before the M series.
jeroenhd 10mo ago
I get the lacking Linux support, but what about Windows? Most serious work happens on Windows and their SoCs seem to have much better support there. Apple's hardware+software design combo is nice for things like power efficiency, but so in my experience so far, a Macbook and a similarly priced Windows laptop seems to be about equal in terms of weird OS bugs and actually getting work done.
- rootnod3 10mo ago
  I run an old T480 with FreeBSD and get about 17 hours of battery out of it. Sure, it’s a bit thicker but gets the job done as a daily driver.
  - speakspokespok 10mo ago
    There is literally no way. Spill the beans!
    - rjsteixeira 10mo ago
      Probably has the extra big battery. Thinkpads have options for different sized batteries.
      - StillBored 10mo ago
        Or they just got one of the 'good' models and tuned linux a bit. I have a couple lenovo's and its hit/miss, but my 'good' machine has an AMD which after a bit of tuning idles with the screen on at 2-3W, and with light editing/browsing/etc is about 5W. With the 72Wh battery that is >14h, maybe over 20 if I was just reading documentation. Of course its only 4-5 if i'm running a lot of heavy compile/VMs unless I throttle them, in which case its easy over 8h. One of my 'bad' machines is more like 10-100W and i'm lucky to get two hours. Smaller efficient CPU + low power sleep + not a lot of background activity + big battery = very long run times.
        KerbalNo15 10mo ago
jorvi 10mo ago
Microsoft is pushing hard for UEFI + ACPI support on PC ARM boards. I believe the Snapdragon X2 is supposed to support it. That still leaves the usual UEFI + ACPI quirks Linux has had to deal with for aeons, but it is much more manageable than (non-firmware) DeviceTree. The dream of course would be an opensource HAL (which UEFI and ACPI effectively are). I remember that certain Asus laptops had a microstutter due to a non-timed loop doing an insane amount of polling. Someone debugged it with reverse engineering, posted it on GitHub, and it still took Asus more than a year to respond to it and fix it, only after it blew up on social media (including here). With an opensource HAL, the community could have introduced a fix in the HAL overnight.