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
Google doesn’t control the Linux kernel.
But Android.
Google also makes their own silicon now. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s caused a change.
I’m so excited for a good ARM machine for Linux. The battery life will be insane
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.
Exactly, which is why this helps reboot that dream. I’m not going to hold my breath, but I certainly hope this does open some avenues for that.
This dream brought to you by light speed briefs
Nice. ARM makes a lot if sense for energy efficiency. Would love to see it on a more budget and low-end device though
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.
The good part about Linux is that the ecosystem pretty much Foss. You can just compile it for arm. Debian already does this.
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?
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).
