Lenovo ThinkPad X13s

All of the ARM laptops are priced as premium business models in the $900-1700 range and kind of fall down in that space - Qualcomm until recently even refused to release any drivers to anyone not a developer partner and it's honestly still not even close to consumer/business friendly. The hardware is capable of doing what people need the culture around it is just not aligned. Also it's a joke to run OpenGL on Windows ARM (it fully works just no one makes it anything easy) My x13s laptop can almost run A tier games without a fan which is impressive but it really feels disconnected and unsupported from all parties making these laptops.

I don't follow. My X13s is a Snapdragon, has full uefi, and works like a normal laptop, mostly. It can't stop from overheating and has no cooling but that's besides the point.

I still won't believe it until reviewers get hands on. In October 2022 I wanted an efficient laptop for web development but didn't want to grab a mac, so I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X13s with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which Qualcomm made similar promises about and it lived up to exactly 0% of them. The main draw, the battery life was worse than my old Blade 14 that ran Fedora, windows on ARM and their current emulation continues to suck, every so often core services would just not work. The Linux support is only just barely getting there, Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images, where a lot of stuff still doesn't work. The camera will never work because of proprietary blobs and the battery life is way worse than windows, no suspend, audio barely works, etc. And those aren't just problems of Lenovo or that thinkpad it stems from the platform. I ended up buying a macbook a few weeks ago and it was 2 years late, should have got it in the first place.

Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip laptops are only just getting there. Last time I tried to daily it maybe 6 months ago, they didn't even have hardware rendering on the GPU, everything was rendered on the CPU. Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images for the x13s, no idea about the Volterra but it's much worse than the windows on ARM experience for that laptop and that's saying something.

I had suspend problems until 6.8.0. Now I have 100% CPU usage by bwrap and still occasionally green glitches on the screen. Not impressed with my thinkpad...

I take that to mean you haven't tried any recent (zen3/4 U series) AMD laptops then, or for that matter the M1/2/3's. I've heard this from a number of people who are comparing the x13s or new mac's with their 14nm intel that has a discrete nvidia gpu (which is eating another 10W+) from 2017/8 or so. I have a pile of laptops including the x13s, and that part burns a good ~30W for a couple minutes, while running ~30% (or worse) slower, then thermally throttles and drops another ~30% in performance. For light browsing it manages to stay under 5W and gets 10h from its 50Wh battery. This is also doable on just about any AMD or Mac laptop. The AMD machine I'm typing this on tells me I have more than 12 hours remaining and i'm sitting at 81% battery (67Wh). And this machine is a good 3x faster compiling code, or running simple benchmarks like speedometer when its plugged in or allowed to burn 35W. Except it also has a fan that turns on when its under heavy load to keep it from thermally throttling. Yes the x13s is cute, it is a thin/light laptop and is probably the first windows on arm machine that isn't completely unusable. But, its going to take another leap or two to catch-up with current top of the line machines. Everyone loves geekbench so, here is an obviously unthrottled x13s vs a similarly rated 28W AMD 7840U. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u That Amd is 2x the single threaded perf, and 50% faster mu…

The Sailfish guys are actually the creators of libhybris. If you run SailfishOS you have to first have Android flashed onto the phone. They use the same kernel, camera drivers, GPU drivers, etc as the original OEM including the prorprietary wireless BLOBs and the Android Radio-Interface-Layer ("RIL"). I've spoken to the Sailfish guys awhile back and I get why they did this -- 10+ years ago there was basically no choice but to use the Android port of drivers + the Linux kernel the vendor shipped because there was no other way to make these hardware pieces work, thanks to the silicon vendors. The story of not needing BLOBs and things like a libhybris-shim has slowly improved, but not 100% . We can run Debian linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon laptop devices (Thinkpad X13s, etc) but bits and pieces are still not there (audio, full power management, Bluetooth, etc). To current Qualcomm's credit there are people inside who are pushing for everything mainline Linux, and minimizing proprietary pieces. Ubuntu Touch relies on libhybris as well.