Comment by zelphirkalt
19 hours ago
While we are at Snapdragon processors ... Does anyone know what (not so technical-)user friendly distro runs without too many issues on a Snapdragon 850? I found Mobian listing Snapdragon 845, but I don't know at all, if that is almost the same or not compatible at all.
Tried postmarketOS yet?
I explored their site, but they only list supported devices, not supported CPUs, which leaves me guessing, whether their OS even works on this CPU. And since I don't really know that, it seems to be a lot of effort needed to use their tooling for non-supported devices, to make an installation image. Though I have not tried that yet. It only made me doubt, whether I could succeed that way.
There's a list of SoC's here: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mainlining#Supported_SoCs
Having basic SoC support doesn't mean you can just flash a kernel and expect the device to boot, though.
The tooling itself actually does most of the work for you. Things like compiling the kernel and building and flashing the install image pretty much happen automatically once you've copied over a template and edited the necessary sources.
You can probably boot pmOS if you copy a template for a device with the same CPU but if there are no similar devices, you're on your own. Even if it does boot, there's a good chance you end up in a "no display, no USB, no wireless, no sound" scenario where the kernel runs but won't be doing anything useful. Just having CPU support isn't enough, you'll probably need the appropriate device tree definitions and possibly kernel drivers which you may be able to lift from the Android kernel if your device came with that.
Very few Android SoCs have upstream support that even comes close to what the Apple M1 has, let alone an amd64 CPU. The new Snapdragon Extreme chips are very different in terms of design and in terms of how Qualcomm approaches them, and even their support is lacking in practice.