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Comment by pdenton | Hacker News Reader

But do they run Linux?

ThinkPads were always great for Linux and I've been happy with them ever since I can afford them (6 years now).

I'd encourage you to do your own research on this. The kind of research where you assume you're getting a soon-to-be-abanonded piece of techno-capital-consumerist ewaste, and critically evaluate anecdata against a rubrik composed from spending time researching the hairy corners of the space. This comes from a bleeding heart optimistic burned almost too many times.

Here are some items to look for: - a device tree for the chipset for your device - a u-boot fork or patches for the chipset/device/both - a Chromebook built with that chipset, due to how ChromeOS development is done - any sign of commitment from the chipset manufacturer

This topic is a lot like early Android bootloaders before... one of the early Motorola devices. Before there was a set of expectations/framework-support/etc for unlocking. That first unlockable Motorola device, there was 9 months of every wise-guy on the Internet swearing it was just a matter of time. And often it is, but only due to what amounts to luck.

Hint: there's a reason that every single Linux enthusiast isn't running a ARM laptop. There's a reason that Linux folks are excited about the Linux on M1 project even though it means jumping through hoops and reverse engineering and playing ball with Apple.

https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/

Fedora 35: aarch64 DVD ISO should work.

Just FYI, we run our entire production api on arm on AWS. Its pretty rock stable and mature. The stability of ARM on linux is pretty much a solved problem at this point.

Are there really no more model specific images required?

generally not. unless Qualcomm is doing something very different.

aarch64 works in all chromebooks - and also the AWS Graviton platform in production.

there's a nice repo that AWS maintains for this - this should be very helpful. https://github.com/aws/aws-graviton-getting-started

We are basically in the endgame here.

Just Fedora or any aarch64 distro? I thought aarch64 meant raspberries.

aarch64 means 64-bit ARM, which apply to anything from server-grade hardware to smartphones to raspberry pi's.

well generally i recommend Fedora as being rock solid and also includes cutting edge (but not bleeding edge) linux infra.

but i suppose any aarch64 distro

Thank you for recommending Fedora. However, I'm on Void for the past 7 years now (whew time flies!). I'm not planning on switching to any distro that has systemd.

I suppose I could still use the live environment as a Linux bootstrap for installing my favorite distro, though.

i would recommend that you be very careful here. You want a distro that explicitly has ARM as one of its official targets. Because there are a lot of moving components here - bootloader, system init, etc that all need to be targeted to the new arch.

If you are not on the Triple Trouble (Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu)... I would recommend you wait until your distro catches up.

Fedora is guaranteed rock stable here. Amazon Linux was originally based on RHEL and still have a lot of cross-upstreaming going on. For e.g. RHEL has support built in for 100 GBPS networking on Arm (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5691381).

Sorry, but no. This is the kind of misinformation that causes people to wind up with $2000 paper weights.

ARM in the cloud and ARM on the desk-top (aka, SBC and Laptops) are nearly entirely different ballgames - certainly from a user UX perspective. Basic boot support, standards around device tree, actual driver support, firmware, quirks, ecosystem challenges due to vendors and the nightmare of a gazillion kernel forks.

I was actually shocked to see that Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 already has upstream support, but AFAICT that's not a tablet/laptop chipset. And the one that is again seems to only be seeing Windows support. The other mobile chipsets with decent suppor are few and usefuls even fewer - maybe three and that's including Librem/Pinephone.

Maybe you can find me an example of the 7c/8c running, anywhere? There are at least some DTSI for some 7c boards, but again, absolutely zero consumer hardware in the wild. I spend time every month looking and the options for running a proper upstream kernel, on an Android based laptop or kernel, and every time "upstream support" is added as a crtieria, the options drop to zero.

I've never wanted to be wrong so much before, but again, I look into this pretty regularly and am involved in some development efforts that expose me to some of these realities first hand (I run everything on aarch64 except my gaming PC). It's sort of amazing, actually, to boggle at how much collective time has been spent by some many random devs at random companies and then painstankingly re-discovered by OSS folks, especially for phones/SBCs.

(granted, if you can boot upstream, it's all downhill from there these days)

> There are at least some DTSI for some 7c boards, but again, absolutely zero consumer hardware in the wild

See Snapdragon 7c Chromebook hardware. There's quite some of those available. The Galaxy Book Go using the same SoC uses Windows on Arm64 instead.

Quite a lot of those Windows on arm64 SoCs also ship on Chromebooks, ensuring Linux support at some point.

These windows on arm devices are UEFI/ACPI, not uboot/DT. They should work, if someone puts the effort into porting all the drivers, and working around all the quirks they are sure to have. Why QC doesn't do this, and get them SystemReady certified is a mystery.

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