I like silent laptops but sometimes I want to max out the power budget and get work done without worrying about thermal throttling. Having a fan and customizable power settings gives users a choice. Apple takes that choice away.
When I got my first Raspberry Pi (4B), I was kind of shocked at how hot even my passive Argon case would get. Though I am guessing a more powerful and efficient ARM or RISC-V CPU would not spike to 100% so fast. But when I got my Pi 5 I made sure to get the official case that came with a fan while I waited for the more powerful active cooling fan to release. So much better at running stuff like YouTube or other media without hitting thermal issues (got the active cooling Argon One for my 4B with similar results too).
Having more powerful ARM/RISC-V CPUs that can actually handle stuff I expect a full on laptop or especially a desktop will be awesome. But while we are in the “still not as good” period of these CPUs both matching x86_64 and programs for them being full versions. The inefficiencies of either needing emulation or just very un-optimized code as devs are getting the hang of ARM/RISC-V coming from x86 mean those temps are easy to hit.
Installing a fan negatively impacts the passive cooling ability (at the absolute least by taking space that could be occupied by a bigger radiator and by obstructing the airflow), so it’s always a tradeoff.
Apple wanted to make it passively cooled, and it wouldn’t be possible at decent loads if a fan would be installed alongside passive cooler.
Macbooks are significantly slimmer, and have way less internal space that could be used to make a combined cooling system that would be passive most of the time.
Not necessarily. I own a passively cooled x86 laptop - granted, it’s based on Celeron series CPU, but when we talk of ARM laptops, we normally don’t talk powerful machines - Macs are rather an exception.
It is bearable but feature complete. Every month linaro and the community add functionality. The most recent things include a custom power-domain mapper implementation and apparently camera support.
If you are running wayland you can simply install any os and its working oob.
The laptops weight and heat production is awesome. Very practical. Also the body is exceptional sturdy and worth mentioning (even in comparsion to a T14, e.g.).
But:
external monitors are not detected at boot
no hibernation
battery time is very depended on the task. It ranges from 4 to 13 hours.
no virtualization support, so one is stuck with tiny code generator runtime when using kvm
audio is pretty quiet, so depending on the environment an external source is required.
I followed almost all patches on the lkml. It appears to me that the upcoming chip can benefit from the sc8280xp hugely. It sufficies for my use cases but I promised myself a little better, yet.
Yeah, I was thinking RISCV. There’s no thing such as libre ARM. Unless he was talking about Libre-friendly which could mean a proprietary SOC company submitting driver code to the kernel.
Without UEFI, the boot process is different for each device, requires a custom boot loader, or at least explicit support by the operating system. Is your laptop going to be supported by the distribution you want to use? What about in 5 or 10 years? With UEFI, the boot process is standardized, so it should just work.
Oh yeah but well instead of using the UEFI we probably should include libreboot or coreboot. But uefi is better than nothing but since its tuxedo we should expect some libreboot
Not “oh yeah” that’s a major concern and the biggest issue with ARM adoption. SBCs and ARM tablets are a mess when it comes to Linux support and one of the biggest reasons for it is the lack of an UEFI. Long term support as said is another very big concern, if you take any x86 box new or old things will work predictably because the OS doesn’t need to know the details of the boot process / low level hardware control.
But if libreboot or coreboot is first implemented on arm boards, i think many vendors are going to follow up with the same. Then it would be much better since we don’t have to risky remove uefi for libreboot
Tell me, what is “libre” for you, from what you’ve wrote so far, i see that it’s just new buzzword for you and you don’t understand what it is, read what tianocore is, if you don’t want it, to each their own, but tell me, how do you install OS on your pc without booting form usb/cd/dvd and not writing entries in uboot at least, and did you even installed Linux even once before?
Yes. I am probably misunderstabding things. To my knowledge, libreboot is a FOSS alternative for UEFI. Correct me if i’m wrong. Libreboot exist to replace the proprietary uefi. Again correct me if i’m wrong. Since libreboot replaces uefi, it also would allow booting from usb, no? Checking libreboot website i saw tianocore mentioned in some release changelog which they will not be including in the default ones because its bloated and buggy. They say they use other payloads. I still don’t understand why tianocore is uefi.
Whatever if libreboot itself does not allow booting from usb, how would a libreboot user install any os at all?
You can use other payloads that allow booting from USB, but they are quite outdated, like seabios or if you know how to boot from USB with grub cli then grub payload, however, usually tianocore is used because it is open source and gives usual interface
So libreboot + payload replaces uefi right? Why did you say tianocore is uefi? Whenever i hear uefi i’m thinking about proprietary boot firmware, and thats why I advocated for including libreboot instead of uefi in theese chips. I don’t understand where is uefi in this libreboot + tianocore or whatever payload
I really wonder if they got any better, I had such a bad time with my tuxodo computer, had to send it for repair twice and replaced it with a used ThinkPad after less than a year.
Probably any of the ThinkPads I had. They were sturdy and just ran everything I put on them. Second place would be the Dell XPS 13, I like it because it is very small and light, but in the one I have now they already had to replace the motherboard after a month and when holding it with one hand it bends and sometimes does a click on the trackpad, but I don’t want to send it in a second time because I normally don’t use it like that.
Oh, cool. I’ve been planning to get a second-hand L14 Gen 1 with AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U, 16GB (2x8) SODIMM RAM and 512GB storage, although I do have a choice to pick a slightly expensive X390 with Intel Core i7-8665U, 16GB soldered RAM and 512GB storage.
At least from my perspective, I could upgrade the L14 to 32GB and 1TB, but if I were to get the X390, I could use it as my main device to SSH through another second-hand ThinkCentre or a similar mini-PC.
Since they’re both imports from the USA, I wanted to avoid paying duty and tax by having it bought through a distant relative from the US. Only if there was a way to buy second-hand laptops from China to India.
Do not get the L-models. They’re cheap, have crappy build quality and I daresay that thinkpad skimps on the non-obvious parts that will hinder performance - even though the machine looks powerful on paper.
I’ve mostly been very satisfied with my InfinityBook 14 Gen7 that I got about 1.5 years ago. There have been some hardware issues (something wrong with the audio subboard that causes the sound from the speakers to go out once in a while, but they sent a new one that I haven’t installed yet…). The mic is also not very good (some background noise), and the speakers when they work (which is most of the time) are also quite weak. I decided to spec it out as much as possible, and it does get hot under high loads, like gaming. The case is sleek, but perhaps a little flimsy?
But mostly it works perfectly fine, and it is such a great upgrade over my old MacBook that I finally get to do stuff on my computer now, and run into very few limitations (running newer games and other GPU-intensive tasks requiring more than 4 GB VRAM are the only things). Not to mention that I’ve had very good experience with their customer service when I n00b out and can’t troubleshoot my way back.