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!
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you already stated both options, there is no option #3. snapdragon support isn’t there yet, you’ll have to make do with Intel and AMD options; for the stated use cases, even 5-year old models will serve you plenty. ideapads, thinkbooks, whatevers are consumer-class models and shouldn’t be gotten used (not even new, in my opinion) as they have nothing in common with T-series thinkpads.
if you’d like to hang on to your hardware for longer, go with the T14 (no S-suffix) as those things are easily expandable, serviceable and cross-generation compatible (same docks etc.).
X1 Carbon is awesome specs and has that lightweight portability element.
Both the T14s and X1 Carbon would be good options. I also have an x390 which I quite like.
I would suggest holding off on buying an ARM laptop specifically for Linux at the moment (maybe not too long from now though). Although there is an increasing amount of support, it’s still not fully there, and there is most likely going to be quirks here or there that can throw some issues you would rather not deal with on a daily driver machine (e.g. having to extract firmware from the Windows partition in order to get some features working for the Snapdragon devices). Probably your best combination of power efficiency and performance on x86 at the moment will be something like the Ryzen AI 300 series CPUs. If you like ThinkPads, I would suggest the Ryzen version of the T14s Gen 6, which is essentially the same as the ARM version bar the CPU. I’ve been using a P14s (very similar to T14s just with some tweaks as it’s marketed for mobile workstation users) Gen 5 and even with the lower capacity 39.3Wh battery (compared to the 57Wh battery you can get on a Gen 6) I’ve easily been able to get 6 or 8 hours in the balanced power profile with ~70% brightness on Fedora, so probably the T14s Gen 6 can do 10 or 12 hours on a charge.
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.
I’m also making the slow transition from Apple to Linux, and I (relatively) recently bought a Framework 13. I went with kind of a minimum-specs loadout, figuring I didn’t really know what I was getting into and I could upgrade it later (the primary selling point of Framework). I’ve been satisfied with running Fedora/Gnome on it for several months. I get the impression that the distro is more important than the hardware in terms of having a comfortable MacOS-to-Linux experience. But because Framework explicitly supports Fedora, I felt like it was a smaller step away from the walled garden, “it just works” experience of being a Mac user team just going straight to a distro and manufacturer that was likely to require a lot more manual setup and knowledge.
I think for OP it would be better off with a Framework laptop. It makes more sense in the long run.
Linux on ARM is great for SBC servers but not so good on the graphics stack. As @Vittelius@feddit.org pointed out Snapdragon SOCs are still lackluster. I’m sure Framework will have ARM in their lineup in the future (there’s already a RISC-V mainboard) while support for these CPUs keep improving.
On the other hand, i recently bought a 6 years old lenovo, installed Fedora KDE and it all just works, more importantly for me power management is no longer an issue. It will never be on the level of the newest Apple silicon though.That could be an option - thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am currently with an M4 MacBook Air and am preparing for a possible switch sometimes in the future. Have been using an old HP EliteBook G4 as second device so I know the look and feel, but something in the Lenovo-style paired with something ARM-based would be perfect. Fedora works fine out of the box so the system itself wouldn’t be the problem - rather the technical base underneath.
Sure thing! I won’t pretend to be knowledgeable about the differences in hardware between like a Lenovo and a Framework. I actually intended to buy a Lenovo but I was shopping for a made-for-Linux laptop when Lenovo happened not to be selling them (they had been before and I guess they are again now). The appeal of the Framework was entirely the upgradability
Even their new Ideapads with the AMD APU’s (8845HS) are awesome and great value.
Framework
To just directly answer your question, it seems the T14s is the best supported.
Ubuntu supports it in Ubuntu 25.04 but it does not look like there is support in Fedora yet.
You will probably have to install KDE yourself but it should work fine: https://linuxconfig.org/kde-desktop-installation-on-ubuntu-24-04
Just needing some spare time to test this - T14(s) is in the focus here. Thanks for the info! 😀
If you have access to China only laptops market, the Lenovo ThinkBook 14/16 + Intel Core Ultra 7 255H are very capable all-in-one laptops that you can run an eGPU via TGX(Oculink) in a CPU that is tuned with 70w that you can’t get with the Thinkpads, maximum is 55w.
I’m assuming you’re familiar with Asahi Linux?
It’s still very much a work in progress.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overview/
At the moment I’m bridging the gap by using homebrew, UTM, ssh into local hardware and shortly remote desktop on EC2.
It’s far from ideal, but that’s where I found myself after my x86 iMac died last year, so I feel your pain.
Asahi looks quite great but is limited up to the M2, hence still lacking Thunderbolt and Touch ID-support. This would be the best way and I like the idea behind the project. Needs some time though.
I’m following the progress of nixos on snapdragon, but its still a bit early for me. Audio kind of working but might damage your speakers, webcam not working, crashing on 64G version but not 32G, etc. Also some funny business about needing windows for firmware or something. These issues are getting resolved but aren’t completely solid yet IMO.
Don’t know where things stand on the more mainstream distros but I’m guessing its probably similar.
any Thinkpad is fine. My E14 Gen2 is very good with Ubuntu
Currently aiming at a second-gen T14s to partly do the switch - there are many technical differences but it could be a good start waiting for Snapdragon to be fully embraced by the main distros.
They are specifically interested in the ARM laptops for battery life.
you can just install Linux on your “Apple Silicon-MacBook”
Unfortunately that it is not that easy - the Intel-ones up to 2018 were no problem and Asahi supports up to M2 with some limitations: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
Have a p14s (older gen) and it runs very well on linux. Im running fedora which lenovo sells prepackaged so you get firmware updates and bios updates through rpm. I would say any linux Thinkpad would be a solid choice. I would just suggest getting one without soldered ram so you can upgrade or repair. Also check the panel brightness too because my display is shit.
