There are some things that dont work, namely ML stuff with pytorch, but for everything else, Termux is pretty complete, and you can run Vscode or Jupyter Lab in the browser for dev.
Does it not bother you that there are things you cannot do, and workarounds you need to have (e.g. running your text editor in a web browser)? What is the advantage to you over a normal laptop?
There are nice editos too as well if you look around.
With 6GB of RAM it can't run LLMs beyond Tiny Llama, but it's def usable.
What is great about those devices is that they are almost perfect thin clients. I also have a big desktop machine running Linux. I remote a lot to it, but with this newer Chromebook it is often enough to do things on itself alone. The biggest perks for me is that they are cheap (easily replaceable), lightweight and have a very long battery life, the keyboard quality and other things are also good. On this newer Chromebook I even wrote most of my thesis for a geographical faculty and even did maps with QGIS.
I am living mostly in a Linux terminal, so with the mentioned old Chromebook I sshed a lot more. I use Zerotier and at times I leave my desktop on and remote to it even on the run with phone tethering.
The phone has 8 cores, 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB disk, it's better than what I had few years ago as a desktop computer.
The advantage is that I don't need a personal laptop - I have only the one from work, and that's the 16" Macbook Pro - I don't travel with that; it's easier to pack my USB-C to HDMI cable and the BT keyboard and mouse, also I don't really care if that is stolen or broken. At the destination I simply abuse any random TV as needed. All my important data is on pCloud plus some physical backups on my home NAS.
Now I really wonder if I could run Kubernetes on the phone...
Lighter weight, cheaper, smaller form factor, not having to worry about syncing storage or things like messages across apps. Also basically a spare power bank for the phone.
>Does it not bother you that there are things you cannot do,
Not really, because I can always SSH to my home computer if I need to have a full linux environment. The case for this is very rare though, and half the time its because I don't want to spend the time compiling stuff from scratch on the phone.
People use RasPis as servers and PCs all the time, and a top-end android phone can often do more.
I have a 8-core ARM ChromeBook and it performs as well as a M1 MacBookAir for 20% of the price. When on the road, the ChromeBook suffices for my needs. For development work I prefer my beefy desktop system with 3 LCDs.
I did try the Linux environment and it isn't too bad. But I don't do development on the ChromeBook. I use a desktop for that. Personally, I don't find working in noisy environments feasible. Even when I was doing my PhD I had a private office.
I assume he's actually talking about something like the Acer Spin 513 which has an 8-core ARM chip but that is over £400. It apparently has a multicore geekbench score of around 4k compared the the M2 MacBook Air's 10k. So the performance scales with the price.
Still that does seem like quite good value if you are willing to wait twice as long for your compiles...
With proot you can instal full fledged headless distro accesible via ssh or vnc
Host your own media server
Control your smart tvs and Iot devices Combined with android browsers with devtools support + termux + adb it gives full fledged web development environment
Connect harddisk via otg and yu have full desktop kind of rasp Pi but better faster with side by side android os
With DEX SUpport connect monitor + keyboard + mouse
ITS ONE HELL OF PORTABLE WORKSTATION With ROOT its capabilities are beyound imaginations
Hell ITS 1000times better than any laptop,
People use RasPis as servers and PCs all the time, and a top-end android phone can often do more.
they're starting to come down in price a bit, i also would like to pick up a thinkpad version for < 5 bills, but they're not there yet, also i've heard very little about the linux support on them
I don’t doubt that they’re good enough for typical user tasks like browsing and office, but I think the HN crowd would be looking for a deeper understanding as it relates to development tools, etc.
Installing most software on Windows wasn't a big problem, just make sure it's an arm64 process in the task manager and you're good. I would highly recommend to make a list of all programs you use and make sure they have arm64 support (not just arm, that's 32bit) before you buy a Snapdragon laptop. VLC was the only problem I encountered, it only had a nightly version that was too unstable. I didn't find a lot of alternatives for media players except for Windows media player (yes that still exists).
I was mostly impressed with how well WSL2 ran on it. I have been running it for years and it works just as well for the Snapdragon laptops. Here too, most software I needed had arm64 binaries, especially from apt. I just couldn't use Homebrew as I used to, so it took slightly longer to install things (brew is supported for Linux but only on x86).
It really depends on your needs off course, if you're into the WSL + VS Code ecosystem for things like Python, Go, Rust development, I would highly recommend it. Don't expect to do any heavy development work with LLMs though, but not many machines are even capable of that anyway (x86 or not).
I knew what I was getting into buying this pc and being an early adopter wasn't going to be easy. But I'm surprised with how little issues I encountered in the end and that I can do pretty much everything I used to do before that. And in case I really can't run an app I always have an x86 desktop to fall back on.
Charging is pretty slow, wish it could be faster via USB-C, but that's a design issue, not necessarily related to snapdragon.
I really wanted to love it - but it's more of an expensive toy because of the battery/sleep. My MBP with the M2 Max still handles sleep infinitely better, and battery life is also significantly better when actually doing development on it. Im not a fan at all of MacOS, and I tend to RDP into my home machine most of the time, but even with that, I'd chose the MacBook for now over the ARM windows laptop.
The existing Nano is already less than one kilogram (between 700 and 800 grams), so small, thin and light. With additional battery life due to a low-energy CPU, this could be a great machine for the road, especially for management.
I wrote about the Thinkpad X13S Gen 2. It's an odd little beast. It has strengths and weaknesses.
Part 1:
Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop
A modern RISC computer trying desperately to pretend it's just another PC
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/lenovo_thinkpad_x13s_...
Part 2:
Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there
Armbian 23.08 is out, and adds preliminary support for this ultralight Snapdragon laptop
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad...
Now there's a T series version -- the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 -- and I am somewhat tempted.
Software-wise as a user, no complaints. All the software I use (90% MS stack) works perfectly.
Even as a developer in the Windows space I have 0 complaints.
Moving to WSL, even that works fine, as long as the software you can get is ARM64 (as your WSL layer doesn't have an emulator). And there you run into brew not supporting ARM64 for Linux... yet.
In terms of hardware, I'm super happy. The fan barely runs. The battery life is amazing. The charging port is MS' version of Magsafe, and adds safety.
The screen is not bad, but not good either. I wish it was brighter and had a higher resolution.
I wouldn't move to a Windows/ARM full-time just yet, but, it's not bad.
