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by Samathy
3306 days ago
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I'm really excited about ARM laptops, but only if: * They have laptop-class performance, not tablet class performance
* They can have more than 4GB of RAM
* You can put reasonable sized standard SATA SSDs in them, or user-replaceable M.2 drives.
* You can easily wipe Windows off them and put Linux on it. |
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None of the modems are going to be supported in Linux because they all use blob drivers and are wholly proprietary.
ARM has no bios or standard boot procedure. Google requires coreboot on Chromebooks, for example, which allows Linux to run on the ARM targets. It is unlikely ARM laptops without Google's strong arm are going to support coreboot.
Qualcomm specifically leaves significant portions of the support code for their SoCs in binary blobs, unable to be used in generic kernels. There is no Linux kernel level support for almost any Qualcomm SoC, and even then they are often some of the better ones. The other "real" options are third parties with ARM's own CPUs on them, which would have ARM's GPUs which have no real device support in Linux (Lima is dead) compared to Qualcomm parts (Freedreno sees updates). Nvidias chips are probably the closest to usable, and Samsung's Exynos are completely unusable and mega-proprietary (you will have a hard time finding even custom Android ROMs for Samsung SoCs).
The ARM ecosystem as a whole is really, really toxic. It is all NIH'd out the butt, there are no standards, everything is proprietary, and nobody contributes upstream. By comparison, x86 is an angelic fantasy.