No, android does not count.

Is there anyone who daily drives Linux on apple silicon or other ARM hardware? If so, then how is your experience, would you recommend it?

For at least 3 years, I’ve been wanting to get an apple silicon mac to daily drive Linux on, lately I’ve been seriously considering getting one of these machines, or even other ARM hardware, like the thinkpad x13s or even the new Qualcomm laptops.

I’m pretty much sold on a used macbook air m1 at this point, but I still wish to hear what other people have to say

  • ReakDuck
    3·
    3 months ago

    I used my Chromebook Duet 3 from Lenovo which has a Snapdragon ARM chip.

    I installed a custom compiled Kernel with some weird distro iso maker from a dude for such devices. It adds a few drivers to make various things work.

    Bluetooth, Audio, Usi pen, Touchscreen worked. It was nice.

    The USI pen and touchscreen glitches sometimes out, which forces me to suspend this convertable for a second and wake it up to fix the issue.

    I couldn’t really install lunarvim or some other development tools because some things just are not compileable/installable. I didnt bither eith waydroid as It was too complex for me to really grasp how to install the header files and so on.

    I did use KDE (5.25 I think), with Wayland and it was good actually. Xournalpp for writing and logseq for storing knowledge in patterns, which sometims had buggy graphics on Wayland for some reason.

    Things like RNote couldn’t work because the Mesa drivers weren’t really installed or smth and kernel header files were needed here too I think.

    Firefox with touch on wayland also was a nice experience that worked pretty great (but needs environment value to be set for Wayland).

    I accepted that I will get a new device after 2 Years of using that tablet and replacing paper on school. Did work great for me. I prefer Penoval Pens. They have them for all devices. Usi and MPP and much more.

    So I got the Starlite 5 (from starlabs.systems) which has a worse Battery lifetime than expected (I think but not stress tested. OS shows 3 to 6 hours sometimes but advertised was 14h) but at least I can even run some small Steam games on that n200 intel chip and install all Applications I want because its AMD64 Architecture cpu. It kinda overheats at the top right corner.

    Note that both products are convertables, or rather Tablets with a detachable keyboard.

    So at the end. I can use this Chromebook convertable for some narrow things but not for everything, like a Computer should be able to. But maybe all the skills you need are capable to be run on a slow Snapdragon with aarch64 Architecture. Unsure how Apple M1 is there compared to that.