This could, in theory, speed up the birth of actually usable Linux phones. Dreaming is still free.
Sorry for breaking your dream but as far as I know, Linux phones are not usable because of crappy drivers for peripherals. Performance is not generally the most glaring issue. Though at least this SoC won’t have trouble going to sleep compared to the pinephone.
Nice. ARM makes a lot if sense for energy efficiency. Would love to see it on a more budget and low-end device though
Orange pi zero 3 is arm-based and can be really viable for daily usage if you are into tinkering.
I’m so excited for a good ARM machine for Linux. The battery life will be insane
Qualcomm has, so far, been extremely against upstreaming drivers. Google has told them they can’t touch the kernel anymore over it
If that’s actually changing, it could be huge for a real alternative
I wouldn’t say that, it’s just there is a lot in vendor kernels and little incentive to upstream stuff for older SoCs that have already shipped. It’s true Google has come around to the importance of not drifting too far from upstream and hopefully we are starting to see the results of that change in attitude.
As I understand it my colleges in the QC landing team @ Linaro spend a lot of time getting stuff into the various upstreams.
I’m all for ARM and having thin laptops / tablets running full desktop Linux… however it’s going to be a pain, there’s a LOT of X86_64 software out there that is hard to get running on ARM with decent performance. And some of those things can’t get ported.
Besides that the ARM ecosystem is a fucking mess of companies who don’t want to implement a generic UEFI thus you’ll never get generic support from OSes like there is on x86. I believe this this is the defining moment of ARM, when the CPU makers actually make UEFI a requirement and we no longer have to do the hacks and nonsenses we see on SBCs to get those CPUs running.
however it’s going to be a pain, there’s a LOT of X86_64 software out there that is hard to get running on ARM with decent performance
That was Mac when the M1 dropped, buy their problem is most of the stuff isn’t open source and one has to wait for the publisher to recompile on an ARM device. I expect a bunch of software to just be recompiled remotely or locally if you have such a distro (Gentoo, Arch, NixOS,…) and not even notice a difference.
A lot of stuff already has ARM builds because of the raspberry pi. Many docker images have ARM versions too.
This isn’t going to be the clusterfuck it was on Malus chips, except for maybe gaming because it’s in the same place. Asahi Linux is dealing with that right now too (donating can help).
My other answer here: https://lemmy.world/comment/10549598
Dealing with legacy software is a huge problem for Windows. I feel like it is a much smaller problem for Linux.
Gamers will certainly be hit. But a lot of the workload in games is the GPU of course, which can be native.
What other ARM software are you thinking of?
Anything proprietary will face issues, games being the more obvious one. And you’ll also run into the issue that a lot Linux users do virtualize Windows from time to time and that’s gonna be harder and worse.
To be frank that’s not my main concern here. It’s the fact that ARM vendors aren’t supporting UEFI and that’s a mess that people usually don’t think about. Right now you’ve kernel tweaks to support the boot specifics and low level shenanigans of ARM-xyz.
This a problem, there’s much more brands developing ARM chips and boards nowadays than we ever had with intel/amd and the PC vendors were still kind of forced into adopting a unified interface. It’s not feasible to make the OS support hundreds of specific boards and their details. I just hope that Microsoft forces Qualcomm into baking in a proper UEFI so other brands will follow and we finally can treat ARM based stuff as mostly generic systems.
