There are discussions in development circles about Arm powered laptops since forever. But most of time they do not mention “normal” users. Like your parents, spouses, kids who are not developers. People who turn computer on (cold boot or from suspend does not matter) and expect them to “just work”.
My teenage daughter is one of them. Her current laptop is one of Thinkpad models, previous one was Thinkpad as well. Fedora Linux as operating system serves her needs just fine. But despite my 20 years of work with Arm architecture I am unable to get Arm based laptop for her.
Choices
There are several Arm powered laptops on a market:
- Macbooks
- Windows on Arm laptops
- Chromebooks
- SBCs with screen like Pinebook Pro
And all of them have issues when it comes to using Fedora Linux on them.
Macbooks
Thanks to Asahi Linux team we can run Fedora Linux on M1/M2 based Macbooks. Which means second hand market as Apple does not sell those models any more (unless 8GB of ram is enough for you).
There are many things which are not supported:
- Thunderbolt
- DisplayPort over Thunderbolt
- HDMI audio (work in progress)
So you pay for hardware and have features which you cannot use. I use Macbook Pro 2021 (with M1 Pro cpu) for local development and stopped checking how work goes.
Windows on Arm laptops
Qualcomm managed to convince Microsoft to not offer licenses for other vendors which means all we can have are Snapdragon based laptops. Which may work nice under MS Windows but if you want to use Linux then “good luck” is all you can get from me.
Some things work, some do not. I was told that Thinkpad x13s is one of best supported models. Johan Hovold has a Thinkpad x13s status page which lists what works and what needs to be done to have some kind of working laptop.
Definitely not a system for daily use for normal Linux user.
Chromebooks
Laptop to run web browser and Android apps. If this is all you need then go for it. But avoid if you are “normal” user and want to run Linux.
Finding how to enable running anything other than ChromeOS may involve digging through Internet pages, finding how to override ‘write protection’ etc.
Just no. Also Arm ones are usually ram limited.
Pinebook Pro and other SBCs with screen
Those are systems for developers only. Normal users should avoid using them as those systems require someone who knows how to prepare them to work at all.
Find/build proper firmware, put it properly in device (SPI Flash or storage media), keeping things up-to-date may end with partially not working device etc.
For developers those are ‘issues’ to workaround/solve but for normal users it may be ‘update went in background and now all I have is black screen’.
And like with Chromebooks you may be limited by ram size (Pinebook Pro has only 4GB ram).
Conclusion
If you are a normal user who wants to run Linux on a laptop then maybe stay away from Arm powered ones. Leave them for developers and check once/twice per year to see how situation looks.