• by ActorNightly on 11/13/2024, 5:44:54 PM

    Not technically a snapdragon laptop, but I use my S24 with Samsung Dex and Lapdock as my laptop. Its actually pretty good as far as usability. Hardware wise, the touchpad is pretty shit, but I use a Trackball mouse anyways and I can easily upgrade if a better version comes out since price is cheap.

    There are some things that dont work, namely ML stuff with pytorch, but for everything else, Termux is pretty complete, and you can run Vscode or Jupyter Lab in the browser for dev.

  • by sorwin on 11/16/2024, 3:23:22 PM

    I purchased the Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon Elite and 64GB ram. The performance seems pretty decent, even while using Visual Studio on it and a few accompanying apps/tools. Battery lasts a decent amount, but nothing close to even 10 hours if you're doing work. There are surprisingly decent amount of apps that run on ARM now, and the x86 ones also run decently. The biggest issue I've had is the sleep - it drains significantly more battery than an MBP, and after a while it seems to go into hibernate which takes a very long time to reboot back into windows (30s-60s+). It's just completely inefficient at handling sleep still. The last issue is battery time when you are not doing lightweight browsing - the battery tends to go down a lot quicker.

    Charging is pretty slow, wish it could be faster via USB-C, but that's a design issue, not necessarily related to snapdragon.

    I really wanted to love it - but it's more of an expensive toy because of the battery/sleep. My MBP with the M2 Max still handles sleep infinitely better, and battery life is also significantly better when actually doing development on it. Im not a fan at all of MacOS, and I tend to RDP into my home machine most of the time, but even with that, I'd chose the MacBook for now over the ARM windows laptop.

  • by certify443 on 11/16/2024, 1:07:32 PM

    I've had a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (32gb) for 3 months now, and my experience with it has been quite good. Mostly been using it for light development, browsing, media, etc.

    Installing most software on Windows wasn't a big problem, just make sure it's an arm64 process in the task manager and you're good. I would highly recommend to make a list of all programs you use and make sure they have arm64 support (not just arm, that's 32bit) before you buy a Snapdragon laptop. VLC was the only problem I encountered, it only had a nightly version that was too unstable. I didn't find a lot of alternatives for media players except for Windows media player (yes that still exists).

    I was mostly impressed with how well WSL2 ran on it. I have been running it for years and it works just as well for the Snapdragon laptops. Here too, most software I needed had arm64 binaries, especially from apt. I just couldn't use Homebrew as I used to, so it took slightly longer to install things (brew is supported for Linux but only on x86).

    It really depends on your needs off course, if you're into the WSL + VS Code ecosystem for things like Python, Go, Rust development, I would highly recommend it. Don't expect to do any heavy development work with LLMs though, but not many machines are even capable of that anyway (x86 or not).

    I knew what I was getting into buying this pc and being an early adopter wasn't going to be easy. But I'm surprised with how little issues I encountered in the end and that I can do pretty much everything I used to do before that. And in case I really can't run an app I always have an x86 desktop to fall back on.

  • by G_o_D on 11/16/2024, 12:26:16 PM

    Since i installed termux on android, its been 8 years, i never opened my laptop or pc, they are just sitting on desk all dusted Android with 4gb ram and termux, is way faster then my windows laptop, Whether hosting, deploying servers, arsenal of editors and programming ide/environments, and all linux utilities, and in pocket

    With proot you can instal full fledged headless distro accesible via ssh or vnc

    Host your own media server

    Control your smart tvs and Iot devices Combined with android browsers with devtools support + termux + adb it gives full fledged web development environment

    Connect harddisk via otg and yu have full desktop kind of rasp Pi but better faster with side by side android os

    With DEX SUpport connect monitor + keyboard + mouse

    ITS ONE HELL OF PORTABLE WORKSTATION With ROOT its capabilities are beyound imaginations

    Hell ITS 1000times better than any laptop,

  • by GianFabien on 11/12/2024, 8:30:30 AM

    You don't specify operating system. It would have a strong bearing upon your experience.

    I have a 8-core ARM ChromeBook and it performs as well as a M1 MacBookAir for 20% of the price. When on the road, the ChromeBook suffices for my needs. For development work I prefer my beefy desktop system with 3 LCDs.

  • by jll29 on 11/16/2024, 12:00:12 PM

    I'd be interested in a Lenovo X1 Nano based on ARM.

    The existing Nano is already less than one kilogram (between 700 and 800 grams), so small, thin and light. With additional battery life due to a low-energy CPU, this could be a great machine for the road, especially for management.

  • by aae42 on 11/16/2024, 12:40:09 PM

    i know it's only been 5 hours, but the lack of comments about any Snapdragon X Elite laptop so far makes it pretty clear.... people aren't buying these things...

    they're starting to come down in price a bit, i also would like to pick up a thinkpad version for < 5 bills, but they're not there yet, also i've heard very little about the linux support on them

  • by lproven on 11/16/2024, 6:26:00 PM

    "So good, I reviewed it twice"?

    I wrote about the Thinkpad X13S Gen 2. It's an odd little beast. It has strengths and weaknesses.

    Part 1:

    Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

    A modern RISC computer trying desperately to pretend it's just another PC

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/lenovo_thinkpad_x13s_...

    Part 2:

    Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there

    Armbian 23.08 is out, and adds preliminary support for this ultralight Snapdragon laptop

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad...

    Now there's a T series version -- the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 -- and I am somewhat tempted.

  • by OptionOfT on 11/16/2024, 5:23:41 PM

    I have a Surface Laptop 7 with 32GB RAM (the Costco edition).

    Software-wise as a user, no complaints. All the software I use (90% MS stack) works perfectly.

    Even as a developer in the Windows space I have 0 complaints.

    Moving to WSL, even that works fine, as long as the software you can get is ARM64 (as your WSL layer doesn't have an emulator). And there you run into brew not supporting ARM64 for Linux... yet.

    In terms of hardware, I'm super happy. The fan barely runs. The battery life is amazing. The charging port is MS' version of Magsafe, and adds safety.

    The screen is not bad, but not good either. I wish it was brighter and had a higher resolution.

  • by blackaspen on 11/16/2024, 1:41:43 PM

    I've got an original Thinkpad X13s that I' picked up about a year and a half ago, used, for a travel laptop. It's hard to hate in the same way that M-series MacBooks are now. The battery life is great, the performance is good, and for what I use it for, the compatibility hasn't been an issue. Firefox works great and I can use WSL with an ARM linux and run IntelliJ inside of that.

    I wouldn't move to a Windows/ARM full-time just yet, but, it's not bad.