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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean that one will be able to purchase tablets with this chip and replace the OS with Linux?

That would be great. As far as I know, there currently are no options for lightweight tablets that support Linux.

Not sure how well WSL2 on tablets work. Does anybody here have experiences with WSL2 on tablets like the new Microsoft Surface Pro that uses the Snapdragon X Elite chip?

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https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/how-well-does-w...

Apparently WSL2 does work, it pulls a native ARM64 Linux distro and then proceeds as usual.

I have the 8 gen 3 and wsl and hyperv work fine just can't really use x86 binaries / containers / operating systems.

I think the performance of x86 VMs would be pretty poor anyway due to the high overhead of TSO emulation. Windows ARM doesn't have the benefit of hardware assistance like macOS does, and the tricks that Microsoft came up with to mitigate the impact rely on metadata that only MSVC emits, so anything compiled with GCC or LLVM would always hit their emulators slow path.

> Windows ARM doesn't have the benefit of hardware assistance like macOS does

I can understand Apple Silicon having an initial advantage due to its hardware TSO support, but I'd have expected some combination of efforts at ARM and Qualcomm to have caught up by now. Shouldn't ARMv9 have a standardized (if optional) TSO mode? I'm disappointed by the foot-dragging.

Yeah it does seem backwards that Apple was the most on the ball with this, when their MO is to force developers to migrate to their newest platform in short order, while Microsoft will be stuck dealing with x86 backwards compatibility for the next 25 years.

> As far as I know, there currently are no options for lightweight tablets that support Linux.

Does this count? https://puri.sm/products/librem-11

560g is fine. But I wouldn't want to work on a 11.5" device. Something between 13" and 14" is my preferred size.

And I would want to do a normal Debian stable installation. Just like I can on a Lenovo laptop. The Librem 11 comes with their own Debian based distro and I can't find any info if I can install a normal Debian on it from scratch.

PureOS has minimal differences from Debian in that they (a) remove all non-free components to get the FSF endorsement and (b) add not yet upstreamed drivers and features, https://puri.sm/posts/how-to-be-upstream-first. So Debian should work sooner or later.

I really hope this is the case because I’d love to have an arm64 laptop for work. Then binaries in my laptop will work on my embedded systems, generally.

The Linux support on the X1E today is lacking. I’m much more optimistic for the X2E.

The hardware is great, though, I love the 12” Surface with the X1E. WSL2 works great!

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