this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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So, I went out with my daughter to look at laptops for back-to-school and the store was dominated by Windows machines with Snapdragon X Elite chips at very reasonable prices. The energy efficiency, battery life, and quietness of these laptops is amazing. Also, I notice they all have these new NPU chips for AI, which I'm ambivalent about.

I'm a Linux-on-Thinkpad man, so I checked online and was happy to see that Lenovo is offering Snapdragon-based Thinkpads now. With these new developments, maybe it is finally time to upgrade my old T540p.

Has anyone here had experience yet running Linux on a Snapdragon-based laptop?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I do not, but I read an article within the last year or so saying that it's doable on a few models -- this one dealt with the Thinkpad you're talking about -- but has a lot of stumbling blocks.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad_x13s/

E.g..:

Getting it to boot from SSD is an epic undertaking, involving entering a UEFI firmware shell and manually going through 30 or 40 entries to find and enable the right UEFI boot entry, but after hours of searching and countless reboots, it worked, and Debian would start. Unfortunately, when booting the installed OS, the screen blanked after just a few lines of output, never to return. The OS was running – for instance, pressing the power button led to a clean shutdown after a few seconds – but with no display, not even a text one, we couldn't configure a Wi-Fi connection, and the machine has no built-in Ethernet port.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Just to clear up confusion, the Thinkpad you linked is an older model. There is a new one with the Elite processor OP talked about.

From everything I can tell though, Lenovo has been very active getting Linux ready for ARM Thinkpads, so I’d assume it could be coming soon.

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