I’ve been running Linux for 14 months now and loving it.

My laptop is a HP Victus gaming pc, which is bulky and heavy, but Its powerfull.

I find myself laying on the couch more and developing from there half the time or doing laptop stuff more and more from the couch.

Lugging it to work and back is also not great.

In October I can buy a new laptop through work and write off half the price against tax, honestly I want everything a mac book offers.

Good solid build quality, not plastic. No GPU needed, just light weight, long battery life, shouldn’t heat up too much, good trackpad etc.

But fuck apple and their walled garden, so I want something Linux.

ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it? What are my options?

Or do I just go with x86 and compromise

  • just some guy@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    1 day ago

    My pinebook Pro has been rocking it with fedora as its primary OS. The most issues it seems to have is with the wifi drivers after release updates. I’ve had good experiences with Debian/Armbian on SBCs too.

    My only advice on getting an ARM device to run Linux is to check the wireless used in your desired device has good existing support. It’s a bit of a pain having to dig around for a no-fail dongle just to update drivers for the internal hardware.

    • pedz@lemmy.ca
      1·
      18 hours ago

      The biggest issue I’ve had with my Pinebook Pro is getting any external display to work. I have bought multiple dongles and none of them are working. In fact, there are multiple smaller issues all different depending on the OS installed. I settled on Manjaro but wifi stops working after coming back from suspend, and it needs to be rebooted. The speakers are weak too.

      And there’s software compatibility. Most of the software have ARM packages in multiple versions, but sometimes it doesn’t exists or can’t work. Like wine.

      It’s not very polished and it requires knowing tech and Linux a good deal. It’s functional enough and could be useful for development, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an everyday laptop.

      I tried to have it nearby and use it from time to time but I just end up getting back to my x86 laptop.

      • just some guy@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        9 hours ago

        Manjaro had such a strong start on the pbps, but maaaaaan did it feel like it just went to trash towards the end. That’s why I switched to fedora on mine.

        About the display out, I actually found that there was something about the port (iirc) where the display out only worked in one way. You could plug in a usbc cable, not get video out, unplug and flip it, plug it in, and you’ve got video out. Of course many distros broke it altogether somewhere during the kernel v5.xx.

        I will say that during the times I ran Manjaro or Arch on it, I was pleasantly surprised how many things from the AUR I could get to build/run on just by asking yay to try!

        I agree though, support and the device are not polished enough to immediately recommend for daily driving. But I also saw last night that there’s more distros advertising images for it. I may have to grab an SD and give them a whirl, see if things have improved. Regardless, it was a poc that definitely showed ARM could be a viable alternative to x64 in laptops

      • just some guy@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        18 hours ago

        It is. Iirc when the m.2/pcie board for the pbp was released a lot of people did use for alternate wifi chips. I opted for a 2260 SSD. I may revisit the laptop and see if it’s hammered out now though