I’ve been running Linux for 14 months now and loving it.

My laptop is a HP Victus gaming pc, which is bulky and heavy, but Its powerfull.

I find myself laying on the couch more and developing from there half the time or doing laptop stuff more and more from the couch.

Lugging it to work and back is also not great.

In October I can buy a new laptop through work and write off half the price against tax, honestly I want everything a mac book offers.

Good solid build quality, not plastic. No GPU needed, just light weight, long battery life, shouldn’t heat up too much, good trackpad etc.

But fuck apple and their walled garden, so I want something Linux.

ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it? What are my options?

Or do I just go with x86 and compromise

  • [object Object]@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 month ago

    With ARM Macbooks, you need to look into what models are specifically supported by Asahi Linux. It doesn’t seem to work on the newest models, at least not right away. This means either the CPU not being supported at all, or possibly missing drivers for some of the hardware.

  • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    I use a MacBook M1 Air with Asahi Linux (using Fedora + Nix home-manager) for programming and web stuff and it works decently aside from a few missing features, although I hate the soldered storage and RAM. I might get a Framework or MNT laptop when it dies.

    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Grass is always greener. Have a framework and want to get an M1 or 2. Nothing wrong with framework just want to try arm.

      • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        What sort of battery life do you get, and what’s the screen and touchpad like?

  • fratermus@piefed.socialEnglish
    31·
    1 month ago

    ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it?

    to paraphrase the saying, “Millions of Raspberry Pi can’t be wrong”

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I wish I could recommend Arch Linux Arm, but it’s really poorly maintained. Literally zero packages available for update for months on end. And no hope of improvement in sight.

    My experience is mostly with Raspberry Pis. (I’m typing this on a Raspberry Pi in fact.) I still have a couple of Pis on Arch. And the one I’m on right now is running Raspian. I have plans to migrate them all to Gentoo some day, but I want to build a build server first and I’m currently deep in another project. I’ll get to it eventually.

    Raspian is boring and maybe a little simplified and restricted. But it’s fine.

  • kirao47@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    Lenovo x13s Gen1, as a light/mobile server with ubuntu/arch arm: nice

    for media production (like music), not useful…

  • undrwater@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    Gentoo supports ARM quite well (obviously), but I’m not sure what new hardware is out there that has an open enough firmware (or that can be flashed with coreboot) that will allow a Linux install.

      • INeedMana@piefed.zipEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        Gentoo compiles everything. Like, even the command is like “compile world”. It’s not as straight edge as LinuxFromScratch and AFAIK they’ve started having precompiled packages sometime in the last few years but the core approach is that you configure compilation flags system-wide and recompile whatever needs recompilation every update

      • undrwater@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        Yes, the source code gets compiled directly on the machine (or indirectly FOR the machine).

        This, of course, assumes one can actually boot a kernel not developed specifically for the machine.

        Some modern boot loaders / managers are locked (Asus does this a lot), so you’re stuck with whatever they put on the machine.

          • lagoon8622@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            1 month ago

            “They” probably are, I don’t know who “they” is but it’s definitely not Asus (at least not their upper-end stuff). Source: bought an Asus “gaming” laptop last year and installed Linux with no issues.

            Edit: clarification on gaming laptop manufacturer (specified that it was Asus which I initially neglected to do in above comment)

  • INeedMana@piefed.zipEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I think the biggest question will be peripherals. Having a laptop where there are no drivers for its WiFi or similar can be tough. Otherwise I’ve been happy with my arch arm servers

    Sometimes there might be no docker image for base image of your project. But you should be able to build it yourself