Anyone can recommend something viable for simple tasks? I don't need 32GB of VRAM, just a reliable machine for everyday tasks that's decent, lightweight, has a good battery.
(I know I'm describing an M2 Air, but I'd like to explore alternatives.)
Lenovo Chromebook Plus 12 or Acer - Chromebook Plus Spin 514. Both have an M2 equivalent MediaTek Kompanio ARM CPU/GPU, and comes with native Debian VM built in (Crostini) that runs standard Linux desktop apps. Battery life and performance are great. You can even get it pretty loaded up with RAM to run smaller LLMs if that's your jam.
As you can tell from my past comments about Chromebooks as Linux workstations here, I'm a daily user and very happy with them.
I have the azus ZenBook a14 with X Elite, 32GB ram, 1TB SSD. Overall it works great on Ubuntu concept. Only speakers and camera do not work (I heard speakers can work with some risk). I just use usb headphones instead and my webcam. The laptop itself is very light with long battery life. I expect it to be better supported at some point hopefully, but it's getting there.
Not for Linux they're not. IIRC Audio and camera don't work, and firmware is non-redistributable and so you need to mooch it off a Windows partition. On top of that the performance on Linux hasn't been great either.
That's true Qualcomm in general, but is fortunately outdated for the Snapdragon Elite X (and only the X). Qualcomm has been upstreaming patches to Linus' tree[1] - but only for the Elite X - the Elite P processors get the classic Qualcomm treatment.
You're mangling Qualcomm's branding to the point that it's impossible to be sure what you're trying to say. Qualcomm's current laptop SoCs are called "Snapdragon X Elite" or "Snapdragon X Plus" or "Snapdragon X", all derived from various bins of two SoC designs, and all pretty much in the same boat for driver support purposes. "Snapdragon X2 Elite" and lesser siblings are due in the first half of next year, so a respectable degree of Linux support would mean having driver support for those chips in an upstream kernel release now so that there might be a mainstream distro supporting the hardware at some point in the quarter after the hardware ships.
My apologies to you and the entire Qualcomm marketing team for my brand-guideline violations - I was going off the top of my head. What I meant in my inscrutable comment was: "Elite X" => "X Elite", "Elite P" => "X Plus", I really should not have mangled the products using such an elegant and intuitive naming convention.
Ok, so having clarified the naming, it still looks like you're wrong about which chips are getting driver support upstreamed, because the Snapdragon X Plus parts are (with maybe one exception, IIRC) literally the same chip as the Snapdragon X Elite parts. Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
(I know I'm describing an M2 Air, but I'd like to explore alternatives.)