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How is Linux on ARM? (For a Laptop) (piefed.social)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I've been running Linux for 14 months now and loving it.

My laptop is a HP Victus gaming pc, which is bulky and heavy, but Its powerfull.

I find myself laying on the couch more and developing from there half the time or doing laptop stuff more and more from the couch.

Lugging it to work and back is also not great.

In October I can buy a new laptop through work and write off half the price against tax, honestly I want everything a mac book offers.

Good solid build quality, not plastic. No GPU needed, just light weight, long battery life, shouldn't heat up too much, good trackpad etc.

But fuck apple and their walled garden, so I want something Linux.

ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it? What are my options?

Or do I just go with x86 and compromise

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[-] WbrJr@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think the only real arm laptop that runs Linux decently is a Mac. I have a m1 pro I repaired for cheap. I installed asahi on it, which went crazy smooth (after Mac-OS stopped messing around). It does not feel different or faster than my other laptop. The batterylife is quite long though.

Its nice for coding and web, but its missing stuff:

  • flatpak, apt and the like need to offer arm versions of a package, not everything is available. (For example Signal is missing, video codecs are missing)
  • can't watch Netflix (video codecs missing)
  • external monitors are not working yet (it should be close to a release)
  • I had Linux force stop some apps because ram was full (I played factorio, and I think one time this happened as well with freecad or so?)

So in the end, you can get it working, for me its too much pain for too little change

I would recommend a Mac m1 air with 16gb ram and 500+ssd.

The asahi website shows what macs are supported, m1>m2>m3 etc

this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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