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This could, in theory, speed up the birth of actually usable Linux phones. Dreaming is still free.
This dream brought to you by light speed briefs
Damn 🤣
Sorry for breaking your dream but as far as I know, Linux phones are not usable because of crappy drivers for peripherals. Performance is not generally the most glaring issue. Though at least this SoC won't have trouble going to sleep compared to the pinephone.
Exactly, which is why this helps reboot that dream. I'm not going to hold my breath, but I certainly hope this does open some avenues for that.
🤩Hyped for that
Nice. ARM makes a lot if sense for energy efficiency. Would love to see it on a more budget and low-end device though
Orange pi zero 3 is arm-based and can be really viable for daily usage if you are into tinkering.
Orange Pi is not open-source and is designed in China. Kinda suspicious this one
I'm so excited for a good ARM machine for Linux. The battery life will be insane
Qualcomm has, so far, been extremely against upstreaming drivers. Google has told them they can’t touch the kernel anymore over it
If that’s actually changing, it could be huge for a real alternative
Google doesn't control the Linux kernel.
But Android.
Google also makes their own silicon now. I wouldn't be surprised if that's caused a change.
They do when Qualcomm wants to use their processors in Android phones
I wouldn't say that, it's just there is a lot in vendor kernels and little incentive to upstream stuff for older SoCs that have already shipped. It's true Google has come around to the importance of not drifting too far from upstream and hopefully we are starting to see the results of that change in attitude.
As I understand it my colleges in the QC landing team @ Linaro spend a lot of time getting stuff into the various upstreams.
I'm all for ARM and having thin laptops / tablets running full desktop Linux... however it's going to be a pain, there's a LOT of X86_64 software out there that is hard to get running on ARM with decent performance. And some of those things can't get ported.
Besides that the ARM ecosystem is a fucking mess of companies who don't want to implement a generic UEFI thus you'll never get generic support from OSes like there is on x86. I believe this this is the defining moment of ARM, when the CPU makers actually make UEFI a requirement and we no longer have to do the hacks and nonsenses we see on SBCs to get those CPUs running.
The good part about Linux is that the ecosystem pretty much Foss. You can just compile it for arm. Debian already does this.
however it's going to be a pain, there's a LOT of X86_64 software out there that is hard to get running on ARM with decent performance
That was Mac when the M1 dropped, buy their problem is most of the stuff isn't open source and one has to wait for the publisher to recompile on an ARM device. I expect a bunch of software to just be recompiled remotely or locally if you have such a distro (Gentoo, Arch, NixOS,...) and not even notice a difference.
A lot of stuff already has ARM builds because of the raspberry pi. Many docker images have ARM versions too.
This isn't going to be the clusterfuck it was on Malus chips, except for maybe gaming because it's in the same place. Asahi Linux is dealing with that right now too (donating can help).
Dealing with legacy software is a huge problem for Windows. I feel like it is a much smaller problem for Linux.
Gamers will certainly be hit. But a lot of the workload in games is the GPU of course, which can be native.
What other ARM software are you thinking of?
Anything proprietary will face issues, games being the more obvious one. And you’ll also run into the issue that a lot Linux users do virtualize Windows from time to time and that’s gonna be harder and worse.
To be frank that’s not my main concern here. It’s the fact that ARM vendors aren’t supporting UEFI and that’s a mess that people usually don’t think about. Right now you’ve kernel tweaks to support the boot specifics and low level shenanigans of ARM-xyz.
This a problem, there’s much more brands developing ARM chips and boards nowadays than we ever had with intel/amd and the PC vendors were still kind of forced into adopting a unified interface. It’s not feasible to make the OS support hundreds of specific boards and their details. I just hope that Microsoft forces Qualcomm into baking in a proper UEFI so other brands will follow and we finally can treat ARM based stuff as mostly generic systems.
😏dual cpu gaming PC armX86 Edition?
SystemReady is already a thing. When it becomes mandatory for design wins hopefully it will become more common place.
There will be some growing pains, but the x86 compatibility layers are getting surprisingly good. Personally, other than Steam, I don't have any software this is incompatible with ARM.
Don't understand the snarky title. This is a good thing. Waiting for AMD to kick out that mobile ARM chip anytime now. We're waiting.
X86_64 has been challenged and surpassed in some cases, no more duopoly will exist anymore fortunately. It's time for a price race now
ARM is not capable of surpassing the existing world of x86 in raw power. It's not about that. People do want an 8 hour battery life out of their laptops though.
The last part is probably referring to the fact that they're using Debian instead of their own TuxedoOS.
emerges from a brand you've probably never heard of
Writing this on a Tuxedo Pulse 14 / gen 3 as we speak. Great little laptop. I'd wanted something with a few more pixels than my previous machine, and there's a massive jump from bog-standard 1080p to extremely expensive 4K screens. Three megapixel screen at a premium-but-not-insane price, compiles code like a champion, makes an extremely competent job of 3D gaming, came with Linux and runs it all perfectly.
"Tuxedo Linux", which is their in-house distro, is Ubuntu + KDE Plasma. Seemed absolutely fine, although I replaced it with Arch btw since that's more my style. Presumably they're using Debian for the ARM support on this new one? This one runs pretty cold most of the time, but you definitely know that you've got a 54W processor in a very thin mobile device when you try eg. playing simulation games - it gets a bit warm on the knees. "Not x64" would be a deal-breaker for my work, but for most uses the added battery life would be more valuable than the inconvenience.
You won't be able to buy it for years until the drivers make their way into debian /s
If only we could prod decision makers at the big software companies to actually support Linux…
Those fucks are way too greedy though. I mean AutoCAD hasn’t even got any significant feature updates in years let alone support for any platform other than Windows and they still charge insane prices for it just cause they can. And at the end of the day me and everyone at work are all stuck on shitty Windows.
It looks like a chicken and egg problem: you don't have commercial software available on Linux so people won't use it, so you don't have enough user base to justify the development of Linux versions. This won't be solved unless a big company like Valve decides that Linux is the way and start solving basic issues like usability and installation of apps.
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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