Facts are Linux support has heavily accelerated from both Qualcomm and Linaro on their behalf. Anyone who watches Linux ARM mailing lists can attest that.
Things have definitely changed, a lot.
Things have definitely changed, a lot.
I get the hate on Qualcomm, but you're really one LLM question away from understanding why they do this. I should know, I was also getting frustrated before I read up on this.
Can you please let me know if there is an ISO to get any mainstream Linux distro working on this Snapdragon laptop ?
ASUS - Vivobook 14 14" FHD+ Laptop - Copilot+ PC - Snapdragon X
It's on sale for $350 at Best buy and if I can get Linux working on it it would definitely be an awesome gift for myself.
Even if there's some progress being made, it's still nearly impossible to install a typical Linux distro on one of these. I've been watching this space since the snapdragon laptops were announced. Tuxedo giving up and canceling their Snapdragon Linux laptop doesn't instill much confidence
This includes Vivobook S15, not sure about the 14.
I've followed that thread for almost a year. It's a maze of hardware issues and poor compatibility.
From your other response.
>but vendors usually require a firmware binary to be signed with their keys, which are burned into the SoC. As a result you cannot use Qualcomm's vanilla firmware and need to extract the original firmware as provided by the vendor, otherwise it won't load.
This makes the install process impossible without an existing Windows install. It's easier to say it doesn't work and move on.
It's going to be significantly easier to buy run Linux in an X86 laptop.
Not to mention no out of the box Linux Snapdragon Elite laptop exists. It's a shame because it would probably be an amazing product.
Then it turned out this was the usual. Nothing had changed. It was just that people online have this desire to express that “the underdog” is actually better. Not clear why because it’s never true.
AMD is still hot garbage on Linux. Geohot primarily sells “green boxes”. And the MI300x didn’t replace H100s en masse.
I remember having to fight with fglrx, AMDs proprietary Linux driver, for hours on end. Just to get hardware-acceleration for my desktop going! That driver was so unbearable I bought Nvidia just because I wanted their proprietary driver. Cut the fiddling time from many hours to maybe 1 or 2!
Nowadays, I run AMD because their open-source amdgpu driver means I just plonk the card into the system, and that's it. I've had to fiddle with the driver exactly zero times. The last time I used Nvidia is the distant past for me. So - for me, their drivers are indeed "so much better". But my usecase is sysadmin work and occasional gaming through Steam / Proton. I ran LMStudio through ROCm, too, a few times. Worked fine, but I guess that's very much not representative for whatever people do with MI300 / H100.
And how does that work on AMD? I know the Steam Deck is AMD but Valve could have tweaked the driver or proton for that particular GPU.
Probably something hasn't run at some point but I can't remember what, more likely to be a Proton "issue". Your main problem will be some configuration of anti-cheat for some games.
My experience has been basically fantastic and no stress. Just check that games aren't installing some Linux build which are inevitably extremely out of date and probably wont run. Ex: human fall flat (very old, wont run), deus ex mankind divided (can't recall why but I elected to install the proton version, I think performance was poor or mouse control was funky).
I guess I don't play super-new games so YMMV there. Quick stuff I can recall, NMS, Dark Souls 1&2&3, Sekiro, Deep Rock Galactic, Halo MCC, Snow runner & Expeditions, Eurotruck, RDR1 (afaik 2 runs fine, just not got it yet), hard space ship breaker, vrising, Tombraider remaster (the first one and the new one), pacific drive, factorio, blue prince, ball x pit, dishonored uhhh - basically any kind of "small game" you could think of: exapunks, balatro, slay the spire, gwent rougemage, whatever. I know there were a bunch more I have forgotten that I played this year.
I actually can't think of a game that didn't work... Oh this is on Arch Linux, I imagine Debian etc would have issues with older Mesa, etc.
Finally, now I have 6x4090 on one machine. Just works. 1x5090 on other. Just works. And everyone I know prefers N to A. Drivers proprietary. Result great. GPU responds well.
I said "LLM lens" because you were talking about hardware typically used for number crunching, not graphics displays, like the MI300. So I was suggesting that the difference between what you hear online about the driver and your own experience might result from people like me mostly talking about the 2d / 3d acceleration side of things while the experience for ROCm and stuff is probably another story altogether.