Comment by arjie
7 days ago
I fully expected this. I really wanted to get the Snapdragon X Elite Ideacentre just because I wanted an ARM target to run stuff on and if I'm being honest the Mac Minis are way better price/performance with support. Apple Silicon is far faster than any other ARM processor (Ampere, Qualcomm, anything else) that's easily available with good Linux support.
I am so grateful to the Asahi Linux guys who made this whole thing work. What a tour de force! One day, we'll get the M4 Mac Mini on Asahi and that will be far superior to this Snapdragon X Elite anyway.
I remember working on a Qualcomm dev board over a decade ago and they had just the worst documentation. The hardware wouldn't even respond correctly to what you told it to do. I don't know if that's standard but without the large amount of desire there is to run Linux on Apple Silicon I didn't really anticipate support approaching what Asahi has on M1/M2.
A tour de force indeed. Asahi Linux only works as well as it does because of the massive effort put in by that team.
For all the flack Qualcomm takes, they do significantly more than Apple to get hardware support into the kernel. They are already working to mainline the X2 Elite.
The difference is that Apple only makes a few devices and there is a large community around them. It would be far less work to create a stellar Linux experience on a Lenovo X Elite laptop than on a M2 MacBook. But fewer people are lining up to do it on Lenovo. We expect Lenovo, Linaro, and Qualcomm to do it for us.
Fair enough. But we should not be praising Apple.
Apple provide even less documentation than Qualcomm. Let that sink in.
Wrong documentation is perhaps worse than no documentation. Although Apple provides little, at least it is usually accurate, and what's left you know you must reverse engineer.
Unfortunately with the main reverse engineers of the Asahi project having moved on, I very much doubt we will see versions working on more recent M-series chips.