Yeah bro 12yo refurbished MSI laptop with Mint+Plasma keeps chugging along

I pretty much only make it do documents and YouTube but still

Hand to God I wish I got into Linux 6 years ago before I bought my current gaming laptop. I would have been perfectly glad to keep rocking my old Lenovo, I loved that little beast of a laptop.

I know it. I'm literally typing this on a Raspberry Pi. I used to run Arch Linux on it, but Arch Linux on ARM has severe issues. It'll literally go months with no package updates.

One day I'll get brave and switch it to Gentoo. Just need to put together a build server first.

TBH most day-to-day stuff still works well on my 12yo mid-tier laptop. I feel pretty good about upgrading its RAM from 8 to 16 last year, mostly to keep up with my multi-tab webbrowsing habits.

I want to quit my day job so I can focus on ARM power mode support in Linux

I have had great success running NixOS on my Pi. You can build software on your main computer and remote deploy with SSH :)

ARM is kinda lacking the hardware to motivate developers, I think. Raspberry Pi generally has good support for server stuff, but I don't think you could really justify desktop use before maybe 2019 (release of rpi 4 with much faster CPU and more RAM), and Android devices are generally really locked down.

Never mind the absolute ocean of ARM SoCs, not to mention Apple's silicon

Yup, i have a mid 2012 mbp with linux mint xfce and it runs great. My biggest complaint is the hardware support. Had to add a usb wifi dongle because broadcom chip was constantly dropping and the sleep wake takes forever and sometimes it wont sleep. But otherwise runs like a champ. I do kinda wish it would die so i could get a laptop without the sleep/wake issues.

dat ssd is doing a lot of the liftin here hehe

I run a 1 year newer mbp with fedora and my main drag is standby voltage. Even if the laptop is shutdown the battery will drain (batt 2 yrs old). Other than that, it still does everything you could possibly ask of it.

And each of these SoCs requires people, ideally the manufacturer, to actually put in the work to make the hardware work on Linux. So many SBCs with severely outdated kernels ...

How much runtime do you get out of the battery? Mine still has the original, runs about 1 - 1.5hrs.

I wonder if my PC counts as low end by now. I reckon I got a few more years until then.

I suppose ARM really missed the mark by not establishing a universal power framework.

Does the cross compilation work fine? I've had some issues in the past building on macOS for x64.

What we need are more ARM PCs with UEFI and mainline Linux drivers. That way they would run a generic OS image just like an x86 PC.

Most ARM PCs require an image built specifically for that system. That makes them a real pain the ass to work with.

Even without the SSD the things only really slow down when you're booting or loading up an application for the first time. Linux's RAM caching is really nice.

Those SoCs usually have one distro with a patched out of date kernel and overall lacking support of upstream drivers to install an off the shelf distro.

Arm devices are notoriously closed. Apple silicon is an extreme example, where it only works thanks to reverse engineering the HW.

Which compiler?

Every config is a low end config on an infinite time scale, haha.

This is why I gave up on a really amazing ARM device that I wanted to use as a router. I ended up having to buy an Intel-based mini PC simply because I didn’t have more time to invest in creating and burning random disk images to SD cards and USB flash drives.

Usually those are from python rebuilds which clog the other packages for weeks at a time. Maybe they could use your build server.

It's been a while. I can't even really remember which language. Now that I think of it, it might have been C#.

Gamers think everything without a dedicated GPU is low end. I play games on Intel HD from 2018. Most work tolerably. I'm not switching until my laptop falls apart or it becomes fully obsolete (to slow to do my productivity tasks).

It has a hyperthreaded quad-core. While it has less than half of the benchmark scores of modern PCs, it's still better than any used laptops you could get under 300€ (looking at you EU used hardware taxes (also, the taxes conveniently avoid the US ... How did that happen)).

SteamOS on the Frame may soon alleviate some of those woes, given it's based on Arch and has an ARM processor iirc. Can't hurt, anyhow.

Python rebuilds don't cause (noticeable) problems for AMD64 Arch Linux.

And any time anyone offers any kind of help on the Arch Linux Arm forums to try to help resolve the issue, the admins ignore and/or lock the thread. They're not open to help and the people on the forums are super frustrated about it.

My ThinkPad be like:

• Core i7
• 16 GB RAM
• 256 GB SSD
• Manjaro Linux
• 4th gen Intel platform

Major or minor?

Core. I'm a software architect, not a musician 💖

If the SOC makers want their hardware to be popular for longer, they really need to add mainline kernel support.
I looked at them as a tinkering platform. But I don't want to buy something which is probably abandoned in a few months.

Yes. I only have one extra line in my configuration:

boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems = [ "aarch64-linux" ];

I am a gamer and can confirm. For gaming, iGPU is objectively low-end. Doesn't mean, you can't play games on it. Current iGPUs are probably better than what games were made to run on two decades ago.
I did have fun playing a selected set of games on an iGPU a decade ago. Dedicated GPUs just give you more pixels, more textures, more shader quality, more geometry, more FPS, and nowadays more AI inference capabilities. Some game genres profit a lot, some don't at all.

Yocto and compile it all yourself. Arch people might think they are cool because they have to use a console to install their de but creating the devicetree for your board and then only get a console over a serial connection or ssh is the true linux experience.

I wish I was smart enough to even consider this

The biggest performance boost from an upgrade in the last two decades was switching from a Western Digital VelociRaptor HDD to a Samsung 840EVO SATA SSD. That was going from 6ms to 0.06 ms random access latency.

The performance boost from switching from Windows to Linux wasn't perceivable even on Gentoo where I literally compiled for the exact hardware, I had and used a custom debloated monolithic kernel. But it got me a massive boost in user agency and freedom of choice.
You can't beat two orders of magnitude reaction latency reduction with an OS change. Windows is bloated. But it's not that bloated (at least Windows XP, 7, and 10 weren't; didn't try 11).
I play on Gentoo btw.

_ Linux T
PC'   `SSD

I would like you to.

They don't give a shit about hobbyists. We don't give them contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Good news: you could just financially support me!

You sound like you're talking about application run performance. That shouldn't be noticeably different. Startup and application load time tend to be where the gains are.

If I/O latency is bad enough it can affect runtime performance from game FPS to browser "snappiness"

Same... All the flash drive stuff and program incompatibility had scared me for too long... But now I'm not afraid to, like, even go to estate sales and try to find a dirt-cheap, old machine to slap Linux on and run it down into the ground until the next one lol. I can live without Cyberpunk 2077.

They're literally a major cause of not getting package updates (even on standard arch they occasionally hold updates due to it), if that's unnoticeable then so be it.

And yeah, I stopped trying to participate on the forums. Never managed to even get a response there. Would be great if they would be welcoming support in any shape (or even consistent communication when the build server is gonna be clogged for a while again so they don't need to annoyingly answer the same questions...)

Bad news… no couldn’t lol. Bearly got myself!

I kept my Win 7 lappy, also a Lenovo, going until the backlight started dying.

Depends on application and hardware. On pretty low specs you can see larger differences between operating systems.

Ok? not even remotely impressive

The maintainer for ALARM literally went on vacation and never came back. All commits are automations on the GitHub account. That's why Asahi switched to Fedora.