> Needing the kernel to be changed for each device is an Androidism

It's an Armish not an Androidism. It's an embedded legacy that really doesn't make sense anymore. But inertia is powerful enough that even Apple is still using device trees, even on their M series SoCs ( https://asahilinux.org/docs/fw/adt/ )

There's no universally good solution for connecting varied kernels with varied hardware. Device tree is okay.

Kernels always have to be changed for different hardware, that's nothing new. x86 kernels don't run on ARM machines, full stop. Gameboy Advance kernels don't run on Switch 2. IBM mainframe kernels don't run on AWS EC2.

As part of good engineering practice we like to separate the parts that are volatile with regard to hardware changes from the parts that are nonvolatile. But that's a kernel implementation detail and we shouldn't pretend it means the combined kernel doesn't need to be changed.

We can also embed several volatile components for several different hardware configurations. That's called inefficiency, or bloat.

There were several attempts for hardware to incorporate the volatile component itself and be self-describing. ACPI (in ROM) is one; device-tree-in-ROM is another. Neither turned out to work well, because it turns out you actually want to evolve that code and so kernels contain lists of ROM patches anyway, which isn't much better than just including whatever was in the ROM to begin with.

Someone from Qualcomm posted a "DT-ACPI Hybrid Mode" set of patches a while back that let you call ACPI table functions, etc even while booting with the device tree, allowing you to control some things like keyboard lightning/power management independently. That would be a good first step but I'm not sure it went anywhere in the meantime. In theory supporting Device Tree by including the blob in a ROM somewhere shouldn't be much more work (if any) than including working ACPI tables, but we all know how that works out in practice!

Not at all, that is how all computers used to be before IBM PC clones happened, and is the world we are going back, as so many seem keen in killing x86 PC legacy, for their beloved ARM and RISC-V boards.

This is actually misinformed, the discussion on the mailing list made it clear: there is NO full ACPI on these Windows ARM devices; they only use ACPI marginally and still require and provide device tree.

Phoronix should have revised that article, it's completely misleading.

One option would be to implement the custom non-standard Qualcomm drivers that technically it needs to implement anyway, but with support for the UEFI/ACPI interface.

On Windows, Qualcomm ships custom drivers that override normal ACPI platform logic in various places, IIRC

There is also ARM SystemReady which is an existing spec for this mainly intended for servers. But it’s not being followed well.

It’s crazy to need a million device trees on server or laptop class devices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45086346

I've been working on embedded systems using iMX8s, and it's equally awful. You have to maintain your own fork of UBoot. You have to spend hours tweaking device trees. The "NXP" kernel is out of date and never updated, the mainline kernel is missing loads of drivers.

Meanwhile in x86 land you can just download a distro and boot it. Secure boot works out of the box. It's night and day.

This is tragic to read. An ARM-based Thinkpad ultrabook running Fedora on it would be a "forever" device for me. I adore my X1 Carbon Gen7 but the battery life could definitely be better and I could stand for it to run a little cooler.

I also have an X13s and it's also the best laptop I've owned... Sort of.

I ran Windows on it up until a few months ago and it was as you said, delightful. Long battery life, fanless, great size, great screen. I put Ubuntu on it (where they've mainlined a good bit of things), and it's still just not very good. Sleep doesn't work (and never will without Qualcomm), certain things still just crash on occasion -- but I do think the webcam works.

I'll likely put Windows back on at some point, which is a shame, because the laptop is great, but Windows is terrible. I simply do not believe any claims Qualcomm has about future support, as much as I'd love to see a newer Thinkpad device with full ARM support.

Whew, thank you for this summary. I just got this laptop as it seemed to have "good" Linux potential, but I've been stuck so far. And as further caution to others, hibernate doesn't work on Linux, and audio is glitchy. Even on windows 11 pro the shutdown menu is missing. It seems to sleep on windows but not sure about battery drain, which is reported to be 1-2%/hr in Linux.

This makes me pretty sad. But I'm still hoping i can have a linux arm laptop in my lifetime; maybe in 10-20 years.

This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…

*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.

If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.

It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.

> Apple gets lazy on top.

A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.

Those that dream of an ARM ecosystem don't realise what they are getting.

Finally the end of IBM PC clones is taking shape.

I'm more on the Apple hater side, but they getting lazy is simply not true.

For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.

Me too. Not a fan of Qualcomm, though.

Intel panther lake is already very close. Good enough for me to be happy with it.

Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?

The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. I also have the Snapdragon T14s which gets about 14 hours, but I'm still waiting to get full Linux support for this two year old laptop.

Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows

    energy-full:         50.61 Wh
    energy-full-design:  58 Wh

But I still get more than 10 hours on a charge.

T14 gen7?

They'd still have the >99% or so of their customers who prefer Windows or will put up with it for the smartphone-grade battery life.

I also had the X1 Snapdragon T14s and it felt like going back to 2008 linux.

No wifi, no bluetooth, no fingerprint reader, no hardware accelerated 3D..

There is a special version of Ubuntu that largely works (it's a bit old) and if you dist-upgrade to a new version it will break.

I spent about a week trying to get it working and just gave up, awful experience.

Historically speaking, between average Android device and average Chromebook, latter is far easier to get mainline kernel + "normal" Linux distro running, e.g: 8 Chromebooks vs. only 1 Android device (and even that is a dev. board) in official Arch supported hardware list:

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms

Alas, new Chromebooks are no more. "Successor" Googlebooks are all Android.

As is WebOS, Raspberry PI, Beagle Boards, netbooks, PS2Linux, PS3 OtherOS,....

Regular OEMs will never give their differentiation factor freely.

Even Linux OEMs like Tuxedo apparently cannot get access to hardware specifications, and have to reverse engineer their own devices.