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Comment by sethops1 | Hacker News Reader

Would be happy to buy a supported Linux variant

It's Qualcomm, not happening...

There's a significant upstreaming effort and their engineers have presented at a Linux con. While not an official product, this time it might actually be different.

https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...

I gave up waiting :(. The first time in 20 years I've not used Linux on a laptop at home. The recent MacBook air deals were too inviting, and I hate to say, solved every complaint I had with my last intel machine.

Asahi not running on latest Air yet?

"This time"? It's been months. The DTSes were built and upstreamed by community members. Qualcomm was too busy absolutely wasting their time on the Windows Dev Kit which is now dead in the water. They clearly still don't get it.

And AFAICT they're not taking any leadership in the technical areas where ARM is not great (bootloader/DTS selection-y stuff, which has been a varying level of nightmare the entire time I've been tinkering with non-x86 devices. One thing when you're selling an embedded product; a different one when you start wanting distros to support your platform).

Upstreaming code taking months is not exactly unexpected. Having seen it from the other side (legal sign-off alone can be a nightmare), I wasn't expecting it overnight. ARMs lack of standardisation is a major pain but that's a multi-vendor issue. At least Qualcomm is actually engaging the Linux community. Something that works, even delayed, is better than years of community reverse engineering efforts with no guarantee of fully working.

> At least Qualcomm is actually engaging the Linux community. Something that works, even delayed, is better than years of community reverse engineering efforts with no guarantee of fully working.

I don't know that Qualcomm lifted a single finger to help the non-qualcomm employees who have been doing ALL of the work to make ANY Linux happy on their devices. Trust me, I was there with half a dozen other people trying to figure out what kernel module was so buggy that it would cause reboot when loaded in initrm, but without it would block boot. And that was just until I gave up and said to hell with it.

Nowadays Intel, AMD and even Nvidia have Linux support when a product is launched, so yeah, it's bad that the laptops are in the wild with no support.

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