[hypercube33]

Snapdragon does poorly I think because it's a bet if it works or not. Windows runs things seamlessly other than OpenGL (it can run that too but it's not anything strait forward - needs the gl to dx store app thing) but the other reason is cost. for the premium business laptop most buyers (business) won't budge off Intel even because of the "no one got fired for buying IBM" mentality at the big Enterprises Ive been at.

I will say with my 8 gen 3 snapdragon I'm impressed and also disappointed - stupid thing needs active cooling and I'm pretty sure it's bad enough that it's desoldered or damaged the core or something from heat but also you can't get driver updates for the GPU if you wanted because Qualcomm be the way it do.

[HackingWizard]

Driver update depends on your OEM. Both ARM and Qualcomm send driver updates for their premium and upper highend Socs. The support reaching your phone is on the OEM. Google has started to push direct GPU driver updates starting with Pixel 10. So, hopefully others may follow too.

[robotnikman]

Usually GPU vendors (Nvidia, Intel, AMD) provide a way to download and install drivers manually (on Windows), including specific versions or older versions. Qualcomm is an outlier in this case.

[CopperWing]

No more: https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2025/05/introducing-...

[pjmlp]

Note that those drivers usually only work well in desktops, on laptops the GPU might have gone through OEM adaptations on the motherboard integration, and a driver from GPU vendors might have issues.

A common example is overheating, because the way the OEM has done their device isn't a setup that the driver knows about.

Which is why on laptops, the drivers if available have to be from the OEM themselves.

[wtallis]

It might be more fair to say that there's simply no standard way to do power management for discrete GPUs in a laptop, or to integrate such power management with Windows and whatever power management it's trying to do. And the lack of a clear "right" way to do things means laptop OEMs use this area for product differentiation with their own shitty special sauce software and firmware hacks.

If installing drivers that come directly from NVIDIA onto a laptop can cause that laptop's GPU to overheat in the sense of getting so hot it fails to function properly or has degraded reliability, that's entirely NVIDIA's fault. If by "overheating" you just mean drawing more power and causing the fans to get louder than they would in an out of the box configuration, the blame for that should be shared between NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the laptop OEM, but you shouldn't blame the user for doing something that should work and would work if those three vendors could cooperate.

[TreeInBuxton]

I've used basically every Windows on Arm machine - I actually quite like my X Elite ThinkPad T14s Gen6, compared the the X13s - feels like they got everything right, that the X13s got wrong

[pjmlp]

The very first they got wrong is how hard it is to buy Dell XPS with Linux on most European countries.

Naturally nowhere to be found on PC stores, and online I never found it on sale in the Dell store.

[walletdrainer]

Why would you want to do that anyway?

[pjmlp]

Because that is how normies buy computers, duh?

Go into store, get to talk with a "genie", whatever upsells to meet their KPIs, and leave with another computer that counts to the world market share in desktop units.

Which for all practical purposes means Windows, macOS, Chromebooks, iPad Pro or Android tablets with keyboard for Dex, HyperOS, HarmonyOS NEXT , and zero GNU/Linux devices.

[walletdrainer]

Why would normies want to buy a Linux laptop?

[pjmlp]

Year of Desktop Linux beyond 3% after 30 years.