Which notebooks are recommendable when coming from Apple Silicon-MacBooks in terms of runtime and efficiency, preferrably for Fedora or Manjaro with KDE Plasma? For now, I am looking towards Lenovo T14(s) or X1 Carbon - mixed use scenario including simple media (photos, cutting 1080p-videos, media management, Office & mail) stuff? Still love the “Lenovo”-brand and its keyboard and look 'n feel so this vendor would be my favourite.
Can anyone of you here recommend Snapdragon-devices yet which would be the best comparison as it’s also architecture based on ARM? Both Fedora and Manjaro have ARM-builds so I hope that the Snapdragon-devices could get along with my desires here…
Thanks for any input!
The Linux support of Snapdragon SOCs for desktops and laptops is unfortunately severely lacking. Qualcomm pledged to provide upstream divers, but then the Windows drivers turned out to be a mess and the Linux version had to wait. It is nowhere near production ready. Most of the hardware enablement work is currently as far as I can tell being done by German OEM Tuxedo Computers because they are working on a Snapdragon powered laptop that ships with Linux. But even their work was impacted by Qualcomm stalling (the linked blog article lists Christmas 2024 as their target release date and that didn’t happen).
Um. No on Tuxedo.
The work Tuxedo is doing is on drivers for their own hardware. It has nothing to do with core Snapdragon SoC support and will do little to help other vendors. The delay has more to do with their internal priorities than anything else.
Core X Elite support has been coming into the kernel since 6.8. Support for your hardware depends on the availability of a device tree. Probably the easiest road right now is Ubuntu:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdragon-x-elite/48800
The best supported hardware seems to be the Thinkpad T14s at this point. I am not sure where things are with Ubuntu 25.04. I would expect an update from Ubuntu soon.
Here is a more detailed account of support on a Yoga Slim and a screenshot of Chimera Linux running on HP OmniBook. So, Ubuntu is not the only option but it is likely the smoothest sailing.
https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/linux-on-yoga-7x-snapdragon/
It is early days for X Elite on Linux for sure. The same can be said for Apple Silicon of course.
[edit: it seems that Ubuntu 25.04 works out-of-the-box on X Elite: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-desktop-on-arm64-history-benefits-and-what-s-next/57775
Get it here: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ ]
I stand corrected
That’s my impression as well - the hardware is there but due to different reasons, there won’t be an experience like Apple had with the Silicon-SoCs paired with their own OS. That much potential unused ATM, sadly.