Has anybody had any first-hand experience with Linux on such laptops?
The issue is drivers for peripherals and wifi.
I think the GPU is now supported.
It's been a long wait, mostly due to Qualcomm as I understand.
It looks like the Snapdragon X gets quite a lot of support now and end of the year or earlier next year it should be quite useable for most.
When the Snapdragon X laptops came out they where all over 1000$ and I completely understand that the number of Linux kernel enthusiasts to set things up would initially be limited.
Used prices come down now and that will also help.
In my case the biggest drawback is not being able to use an external screen via HDMI and the sound support (although you can workaround that with BT). Let's not talk about widevine, I managed to eventually get it to work but it was very painful.
If we get full audio support and solve some of the widevine issues, this can easily become a daily driver for when I'm traveling or giving presentations.
If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application. It's so bad, volunteers created an alternative. Even they are getting tired of Tuxedo though [2]
The device is also not repairable at all. I had an issue with my screen and they gave me a quote of ~200€+ to repair it. I'm sure I could fix it myself for a lot less, but no parts are available and no instructions.
I hope they improve, but for now I'm disillusioned and would not buy it again.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/TUXEDO-Drivers-Taint-Patches
[2] https://aaronerhardt.github.io/blog/posts/tuxedo_rs_update/
That is unfortunate. I hoped they were more like System76.
What you think would be the alternative in Europe ?
I've replaced it with the new framework 13 inch, which so far works well, but I've only had it for 4-5 months. ( well, but not perfect, because the new AMD AI CPU has issues with suspend on linux)
Oh? I'd seriously considered buying the 13 w/this AMD CPU and I guess I naively thought it would be ideal. What sort of problems with suspend are you seeing?
The only solution is to reboot/shutdown, but it takes a long time and there are some scary fs checks running. Luckily no lost data so far. Currently I'm just shutting down the machine every time because it the boot times are quite fast.
Upgraded to 6.15 and sleep seems to work well now.
I use NixOS
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/yjuahx/star_...
Clearly Framework is not supporting Linux if there are issues with suspend.
The problem with System76 is that Lenovo exists. There isn’t much of a real reason to buy a “standard laptop” like system76 over a higher volume OEM like Lenovo.
With Framework you’re at least getting the extreme modularity and upgradeability as a major differentiator.
But with System76 you’re essentially getting a regular laptop that you could get from any other major brand. You’ll have an easier time getting parts with Lenovo.
Otherwise at this point I believe the Framework laptops have pretty solid Linux support and is a good option if you're ok w/ so-so battery life.
Software side was smooth sailing as well.
And exactly the same experience with OEM vendors that were supposed to be Linux friendly, on my case the whole netbooks effort, where graphics, video decoding and wlan never worked as well on Windows, even though they were supposed to.
Dell XPS also had their issues for something that was supposed to be Canonical certified as running GNU/Linux properly.
It seems Android, ChromeOS and WebOS are the only ones where OEMs actually care to make it work properly, naturally the cloud and IoT vendors with their custom distros as well.
And I do not miss at all the Microsoft bullsh*t on tracking and advertising. Or the general sluggishness of Windows.
Early this year I bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD. In contrast to when I had a T14 Gen 1 AMD early 2020s, everything just works. All the hardware works, suspend/resume works, all the hardware comes up after a resume, etc.
Lately I have been using my ThinkPad much more than my MacBook Pro. NixOS is a superpower to me and having NixOS on a laptop is living the dream.
You were here for the really hard stuff, and missed the beginning of the good times, I think. Unlucky! Oh well. Welcome back!
I have also used headless Linux machines throughout my Mac vacation :).
With regards to the hard stuff. 1994-2007 was from my 12th to my 25th, basically overlapping with when I was a high school/university student. So, plenty of time and not enough money for a Mac or some commercial UNIX system. That period was also super exciting, especially up till the dotcom crash a lot of people thought that Linux was going to take over the desktop (anyone remember Corel Linux and even WordPerfect on Linux?). Linux did take over, but in different ways than we imagined, the server was kinda expected after the mid-nineties, but Android not.
Can you expand on this? Just curious what is the main value-add you are getting from NixOS in particular?
- Great modules for programs/services in NixOS and home manager. So I typically do not have to figure out what configuration format something uses. Most common options are exposed as module options and for options that are not exposed, it's often possible to write the configuration in Nix (or worst case a string that gets added to the configuration). I can access the documentation of all modules with a simple _man configuration.nix_ or `man home-configuration.nix`.
- I can override arbitrary packages with custom build options, etc. I don't have to maintain separate .spec/rules files or anything. I can just put a somePackage.override/overrideAttrs somewhere in my system configuration and the package customizations are there with my system configuration and always get built with the system.
- Packaging something to hook it up in my system is low-effort. nixpkgs is the largest distribution package set (according to repology). But sometimes something is missing or I want to add some of my own projects as packages, unless it's some insanely bad proprietary application, I can do it in a few minutes.
- Atomic updates/rollbacks.
- Ad-hoc or project-specific development shells (though that is more Nix than NixOS).
I know that the learning curve can be steep, but once you really get Nix and NixOS, it's kinda like being the master of the universe, erm, I mean your systems.
I might try it again. Last time I really did not like that any minute config change would take 15s to apply.
But the biggest issue for me, is that right now I have a good enough solution, that allows for config file update from applications. I have a small git repo, with one shell script, that symlinks config files, and even generates a few. And so backing up the latest config changes from KDE, freecad, etc, is a git add & commit away. I have another shell script to setup the base Ubuntu the way I want. And my data is replicated via syncthing.
Also it isn't as if I haven't subscribed to Linux Journal during its whole lifetime, or LWN, or even used to write M$ on email signatures and Usenet messages, for that matter.
Signed someone that knows Linux since kernel 1.0.9, yet has better things to do than making it work.
Slapping Linux on a Windows box is a mug's game
This kind of discussions are so repetitive.
They also seem to really care about supporting Linux. E.g. WWAN modems need proprietrary unlock procedures these days thanks to the FCC [1]. Most vendors would shrug and say 'sorry, we only support Windows', Lenovo has a repo with Linux support for all the modems that ThinkPads support (you can only use supported modems, because the FCC apparently only certifies laptop/modem combinations, not individual modems):
Inb4: I have used Linux exclusively from 2019 to 2024. It wasn't that bad but it wasn't flawless. At least once per month I met some issue that took few hours to solve. Currently on Win11, zero problems (yes, I am using pirated LTSC IoT version, how did you know?)
As everyone knows, Windows has its own fair share of issues. The first is that it is not a Unix :).
If that was the case we wouldn't be allowed to replace AA batteries.
I know quite a few non-techies who replaced their phone screens themselves. That’s been unexpected and impressive to me. Honestly, you can get unlucky, but in my experience, electronic components are surprisingly resistant to abuse.
Sure, if everything is soldered or glued down it‘s intentionally hard to self-service, but that’s also down to your consumer choices. There is nothing inherently unserviceable.
They cannot.
>The device is also not repairable at all. I had an issue with my screen and they gave me a quote of ~200€+ to repair it. I'm sure I could fix it myself for a lot less, but no parts are available and no instructions.
Besides that some European countries have required for decades that new houses/apartment have central residual-current circuit breakers for the whole house (unlike the US where as far as I understand they are only required in certain areas and are often in the socket and not centralized).
It's like when people work on their car, they do it at highway speed, using a nacelle precariously balanced under the car, with the front wheels propped up on dollies for access.
...Are we talking about CRTs from like 20 years ago? What does that have to do with laptops?
The entire software stack of TUXEDO is tightly integrated, instead of working on a generic solution.
That sounds like the same situation with smartphones, which are nearly all ARM but every SoC or variation of one is different enough that the software is customised for each one.
If you want to change some settings oft the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
WTF. I thought Android being Java was already going too far, but they seem to have gone to a whole new level of insanity.
Didn't went out the same way as with J++, unfortunately.
That's not what I would describe as "resolving a license compatibility issue"
"TAINTing" a driver/code doesn't mean it's blacklisted, it means it can't be upstreamed into the GPL codebase. It means that if you build a Kernel with it, it's no longer considered OSS-friendly.
There are plenty of legitimate and viable codebases that use TAINTed kernels. The DoD, various government entities around the world, some commercial interests, etc.
Huh, so Tuxedo developed their own ITE 829x kernel driver.
I have a Clevo based laptop, similar to the ones they sell. Years ago I reverse engineered the keyboard's features and wrote a user space driver.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
I interacted with Tuxedo quite a few times back then while I was figuring this stuff out. They even sent me source code for a pre-release version of their Electron app. It didn't help much in the end but they proved to be much nicer and more responsive than other manufacturers and even Clevo itself.
Wish they'd emailed me about their driver. I could have helped develop it, especially if they had given me documentation.
I briefly explored the idea of turning it into a kernel module and contributing it to the kernel. While reading Linux driver source code, some comments gave me the impression they'd prefer code remained in user space if possible. Since I already had a working user space driver, I decided not to contribute it.
I wrote the above program because Clevo's app was Windows only and so aggravating to use it defies description. Looks like Tuxedo ran into the same problem with their Electron app, if the complaints in this thread are any indication... Déjà vu.
My last machine was a Thinkpad, and I never got it to work nearly as well. Standby mostly didn't work and when docking it, external screens would be arranged incorrectly unless I rebooted. USB ports also did not activate when docked, so I had a script for resetting the USB devices. Sometimes a new kernel version would come along and cause it to start freezing.
I did check out other laptops before buying the tuxedo (t14s g6 amd, zenbook s14), but according to the information available at the time, those machines had lots of issues. They were also more expensive.
Therefore I'm very curious about which laptop that you think is both better and cheaper than tuxedo, and has full hardware support out of the box?
Lenovo pros:
- better case
- better keyboard
Tuxedo pros:
- significantly cheaper price
- two fan setup enables faster performace (it is stable with 90W power consumption)
- almost twice as long battery life (tuxedo has bigger batery with similar weight and size)
- two nvme slots
If you want more powerful notebook with slightly worse build quality, tuxedo is good choice.
Anyway I would go with FRAMEWORK there. Sadly they did not deliver to my address when I was in the market, but now they do.
Hopefully latest Tuxedo does have better hardware support? Mine has problems with charging, usb-c charging is even worse (slow charge normal performance or ok charge and 5W throttling which makes all cores go at 1GHz), battery saving feature that hides 10% of battery capacity in firmware etc. They also stopped delivering any firmware updates after a few months.
I've got an MSI laptop and I've settled on simply never using the Nvidia card (prime-select iGPU only). The integrated graphics have access to 16gb of ram (versus the Nvidia card's 4gb) and deliver better performance without the whole laptop hitting 100 degrees.
I hope the Asahi Linux project succeeds so I can buy the fabled Apple silicon laptops just to run Linux on them.
I just double checked the firmware setup and it seems I was misremembering things. There's a toggle between "DISCRETE" and "MSHybrid" which means dGPU only and hybrid iGPU + dGPU graphics. I use it in MSHybrid mode with nouveau drivers. This keeps the dGPU in the lowest possible power mode.
It still wastes around 7-15 W doing pretty much nothing according to my monitoring script. That's the entire power budget of a single board computer like the Latte Panda Mu.
Which means they can't be upstreamed because GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 (for the same reason CDDLv1.0 is considered incompatible).
They either need to track every copyright from the contractors (who AFAIK didn't sign over licensing to Tuxedo) to relicense the code, or write drivers again from scratch.
But you are right that not having drivers upstream is really strange decision.
> It's so bad, volunteers created an alternative.
Years ago I wrote my own Linux user space driver for the keyboard on my Clevo based laptop. The Clevo application was so terrible I reverse engineered it and made my own Linux free software replacement.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
It seems some Tuxedo laptops have the same keyboard. Maybe Tuxedo users will find it useful.
[1] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-on-ARM-is-coming.t... [2] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/How-is-TUXEDOCOes-ARM-Not...
With applications.
And working webcam light and audio.
Long battery is pretty nice. And you don't have to be productive for 8 hours straight to feel the niceness.
It is fine, and good of them to try, but if you don’t need it, you don’t need it.
Do you think that you are the center of the world and no product deserves to exist unless you have an immediate use for it?
The article mentions an emulator, but it seemed to be for running games.
I also heard MS had something similar in their arm dev kit, but haven't looked much into it.
I think they mention games because a lot of other software for Linux is generally open source. So a lot of times it's pretty easy to get an ARM build.
It also does a neat performance trick where it intercepts library calls and redirects them to native versions of the same library.
Windows on ARM has allowed running x86 code from launch with Windows 10 and x64 code since Windows 11.
There is absolutely no user land infrastructure for using this in the way that Rosetta does on macOS, though. Feel free to contribute it!
I'd really like to replace my old Thinkpad with a long-running, lightweight Linux laptop that can also do some gaming on the side (think Witcher 3 on good settings) but Snapdragon has not lived up to the hype AFAIK.
But big thumbs up to all the Linux devs that are working on improving the situation!
Yeah we need some trade off's. But for dev's & a lot of ops stuff I enjoy more x86 as it's de facto standard.
To answer your question directly, I've done multiple 2-3 hour sessions at a time without taking the glasses off and have done 10+ hour days in them when away from home. At home I typically tend to use them for a couple of hours in the afternoons when I'm tired and more willing to sacrifice screen real estate for comfort.
The detail isn't the same and you have to plan your screen layout a bit (i.e. looking at code near the edges of the screen is annoying). But I think they're the future - a much bigger deal than VR or AR.
Woe to you if Debian pushes a systemd update. It took repeated incantations with apt to get that update to take, because updating systemd would crash the VM Every. Damn. Time.
[0] The current console-only incarnation.
I'm cautiously optimistic about AVF, but I don't see why it would have any better performance than native code running directly on the host system?
Tho, I really want this to happen. As far as I've tested on Volterra (ms dev kit 2023), linux has a lot going right for it. there is a ton of ARM64 packages, and drivers just work (e.g. I had to wait so long for Wacom to release WoA drivers while it worked out the box with ARM64 linux builds). the potential is there and it's great.
On a last note, not being able to ship necessary firmware and relying on a WoA boot drive still sucks.
Battery life could be a bit better but is decent.
With some tweaks, it can also be silent. Good ThinkPads are not far from the user experience delivered by the latest MacBooks, and they have the advantage of running free software and x86_64.
That would be awesome!
A aarch64 Ubuntu vm inside MacOS runs faster and lasts more time than a booted up Ubuntu on arm in these devices. This is how far behind these things are.
and what bums me the most is that it's all about software. The hardware is great, but software on Snapdragon is taking a lot of time to catch up and it screams M$ lobby to me
10W for video playback is a lot. 5w average for light workloads is not unrealistic... I think your perception of power consumption is a number of years out of date at this point.
After all, Apple claims 18 hours from a 54watt-hour battery - you really think nobody else can get within 2x of that?
My AMD Framework 13 running Fedora (an officially supported option: https://frame.work/linux ) also gets around that amount of battery life. And can run games surprisingly well.
Even when plugged in, AMD laptops are quite a bit slower than Macs. When unplugged, it's not even close.
Clevo is their ODM. They work with Clevo to put together a laptop, and Clevo gets the right to sell a Windows variant. Their version differs, particularly in firmware but also possibly in chips.
I'm about to try the Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon Q Elite with Linux so we'll see how it goes.
I would appreciate a native Linux arm laptop, but this setup works for me in the meantime.
On Linux?
The hard reality is that Apple invests in SoftBank, the owner of ARM's IP, and nobody in the Linux (or Windows) world does the same. They really just don't care. There aren't entrenched hardware manufacturers that want to reprise the featureset of UEFI on ARM. You will be waiting forever if you demand an ARM laptop that works like an x86 one with Linux.
ARM has been like this forever, and it's unlikely it will change due to Asahi or Apple Silicon. ARM lives or dies based on Apple's treatment of it, no other corporate stakeholder has comparable control over the ISA.
Note: not an Apple fanboy.
Well, there's your leading qualifier. Covid taught us that businesspeople can do their work on an iPad with Google Docs if they had to. It's not much of a surprise to anyone that they can do their work on a Mac with a souped-up iPhone processor.
My shock with Apple Silicon is how it collapses with non-browser-oriented tasks. The moment I stop watching YouTube it's like I'm back on Linux in 2008 again, trying to run everything through a Windows VM. My old Pro Tools plugins? Gotta use a VM, Rosetta won't work. A modern OpenGL program? Gotta wrestle depreciation flags to compile it. Even my old Homebrew casks had to get rewritten because Apple Silicon had to switch stuff around again.
By the time people insisted "try the M2 for a few weeks!" I was already dailying NixOS. MacOS is continuing the frying-pan-to-fire arc it started ever since 10.14.
Your experience as a developer doesn't represent a generalized view and that's why many developers use Apple computers. People are different.
Chicken and egg. The Linux vendors don't have the power to drive ODMs nearly as much as Apple because everyone keeps buying Windows and slapping Linux on it (then complaining online when they have to be the systems integrator themselves, fixing the inevitable razor cuts)
This is a shame because all the ARM licensees worth buying hardware from always have higher margins on smartphones or services. They have no commitment to supporting the PC or server market, let alone the software they use or featureset they depend on. It's no wonder that ARM adoption is stalling on the runway while Power11 gets upstream kernel support and RISC-V displaces integrated ARM ICs. Their only stakeholder is making their money off iPhone apps, not professional software.
Try Intel's Lunar Lake. My Zenbook 14S (S is important here!) does 12h+ on VS Code, browser & meetings (but compilation is remote). The screen is better than on Macbooks (it's high-res OLED), overall build is good. You probably won't be able to run Ubuntu LTS without installing latest kernel, but regular version should do just fine.
If you don't like ASUS, you can also try Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13. It's a bit on the smaller side and costs twice as much, but it's a pretty neat device.
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