ARM Laptop Suggestions?

[delayed]

And you reject the Mac, right? Thats the given? Or would a secondhand M1 Mac do you?

What about the ThinkPad X13s ?

I think most of the drivers have been implemented but could not talk of personal experience (have the yoga c630 and drivers requires firmware files that need to be extracted from windows, my current experince is useable but subpar )

ARM-based laptops have good (but wouldn't say exceptional) battery life with very light usage. Once you start using a browser or pretty much anything using a non-trivial amount of CPU, that battery life goes down the drain. My PinebookPro is very happy to work for 10 hours on one charge, as long as the CPU is left alone. LibreOffice, very light shell scripting, book reading, no bluetooth, things like that... Once I start (ab)using QtCreator, or start messing with Firefox, that number gets closer to 2 hours.

For comparison one of my other (budget) laptops with Ryzen 4700u gives me over 6 hours of battery life with light usage, but I still get around 4 hours out of it when I keep compiling the kernel over and over again.

If you don't mind glossy screens and crappy keyboards and lack of ports, М1 Airs are your best bet if you are after cheap and good battery life: haven't tried it yet with Asahi Linux, simply because I do my Linux stuff on X1 Carbons (though they are getting worse by the generation).

huawei metapad e go, https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-e-go/

I believe most of them are locked down - but something the Microsoft surface or the Samsung galaxy book but have nice performant arm editions.

Qualcomm has a list of all Windows laptops (I guess Chromebooks should work too?):

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-...

Though their latest CPU seems to be Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3? And it hasn't ben updated for 1.5+ years. It seems to perform at around 60-70% of M1 which I guess is not that terrible.

But I'm not sure their battery life is really that exceptional? The ThinkPad X13s doesn't seem to last that much longer than laptops with low-power AMD CPUs (which are both much faster and should have way less driver and software issues, e.g. even laptops with something as old as 5700U supposedly have comparable battery life according to some benchmarks)

Surface Pro X

The available options are:

- Thinkpad X13s (barely works Ubuntu/Armbian)

- Microsoft Surface Laptop (barely works Fedora)

- Macbook Air (works Arch, Fedora, Debian)

Macbook Air M1 will provide you with 3x CPU power and will have the best drivers and largest community.

If you want 0.5x M1, you’re already out of options. The closest you get is 0.33x M1 that barely works.

Hmmm, if you're ok with say 0.1 of an M1, then maybe one of the Pinebook laptops would be useful to consider?

https://pine64.com/product-category/pinebook-pro/

They're only about US$200, so depending on your budget it might be a useful experiment. :)

The MNT Reform[1] is a pretty sexy open hardware laptop with a mechanical keyboard, optional trackball, and a small ARM processor.

A cursory glance at geekbench shows that you can get around 50% the performance of a 2020 Macbook Air M1, if you get the upgraded CPU option.[2][3] I have no idea how useful those benchmarks are, though.

[1] https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16291496 [3] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2504172

> I'm looking for an ARM laptop. I'd settle for something with half the horsepower of an m1, running Linux, with fully functional drivers. Does such a thing exist?

It's surprising that there are few actual suggestions here, so I guess we're not quite there yet, at least as far as affordable mainstream options go? Props to Lenovo and others for trying, though.

I recall needing something similar a few years ago and just opting for an x86 netbook with an underpowered Celeron, something like this: https://techbite.eu/en/laptopy/laptop-zin-3-14-1 (probably just a rebrand of something else)

The battery life was great and it was dirt cheap, which I'd love to have with ARM and perhaps more RAM.

That particular model was just an example (build quality shows the budget segment and Wi-Fi drivers started working in Linux distros out of the box some time after the release), but I hope we'll have more budget computing options I'm the future! Maybe even RISC-V some day.

Given the current amazon price of $750 for an m1 and the rapid progress of the asahi project (arch and fedora) I don’t even understand how this is even a question? Are you seriously asking for advice or do you just want people to argue with you? The fedora devs came out and said the asahi system on m1 is the reason they were able to qualify btrfs as the default fs for fedora, so that should tell you something.

Dell has one (I haven't verified that it meets your requirements:) https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-14/spd...

An M1 MacBook is your best bet. If that doesn't meet your needs, then you'll want to get an Intel or AMD laptop, for now.

I'm not aware of a non-Apple ARM laptop that works better than an M1 with Asahi.

Here is question for you: why ARM?

Apple users have to switch to ARM because that's what Apple decided to use, but in PC-land you can get more performance out of a new ryzen for less money.

You can rent an ARM VM for the few times you absolutely need an ARM.

>I want exceptional battery life.

You can get very good battery life with a modern "windows" (i.e non-mac) laptop with a bigger battery, and running a very lightweight distro like bunsenlabs (an optionally tweaking some CPU throttling parameters). In standby the battery should last close to a full day. With modern fast charging over USB-C, this works very well.

You can also just get a modern Android Tablet with good battery life, and use a bluetooth keyboard + mouse with something like Termux on the backend. You can run vscode web gui for an IDE.