alt Hacker NewsI don't think that ARM Laptops have a chance in Linux land as long as each model requires stuff like a custom DT.
I'm typing this on a Thinkpad x13s Gen1, "21BX000XGE". I really really like the device, best laptop I've owned so far, speaking strictly from a hardware perspective. No vents mean I can use it on a pillow, and it's dead silent. It never runs hot, great battery life. Thin and light, yet has all the performance I need. But would I recommend the laptop to any fellow Linux user? Absolutely not.
Even though it was released in 2022, the webcam still won't work. I can't limit the battery charge to 80% like on my x86 Thinkpad. There was a time when the graphics driver and Chromium didn't like each other and I had to wrangle Chromium into software rendering mode to avoid heavy artifacts on the screen (export force_gl_vendor="notfreedreno"). In fact, I still have the workaround in place. Not sure if it's still needed though. A fix was merged upstream last year, need to check whether it made it into Fedora yet.
I got the machine in 2025, and here are the workarounds and config changes I had to make just to get Fedora running last year, 3 years after release:
- extra kernel arguments ("arm64.nopauth" seems to be needed still in 2026, "clk_ignore_unused pd_ignore_unused" I have been able to remove at some point)
- GRUB config (GRUB_DEFAULT_DTB=/boot/dtb/qcom/sc8280xp-lenovo-thinkpad-x13s.dtb)
- initramfs modification, /etc/dracut.conf.d/x13s_firmware.conf: install_items+=" /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcdxkmsuc8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcadsp8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qccdsp8280.mbn.xz ". Not sure if these are still needed, they were at some point.
In late 2025, installing Fedora was still a pain in the butt. There were custom-built ISOs for my device, but they didn't work because my firmware was too new. Stupid me ran a firmware update on the preinstalled windows. I tried building my own ISO, but the firmware never recognized those as a boot device for some reason (I have successfully built custom ISOs for x86 many times). In the end, I was able to use QEMU + chroot on my x86 machine to install Fedora ARM onto an external HDD, make the needed modifications in there, boot that on the laptop and run the anaconda installer, then make modifications to the install on the internal storage.
I just ran a quick `wc -w` on my installation and debug notes for the machine, and it's a cool 11180 words. At some point, it turned out that the display my unit uses was not in the list of known displays for the x13s. Seems that was mostly inconsequential aside from a kernel warning and maybe slower wakeup. Helped upstream with that, which eventually resulted in this commit: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/3330b71caff6cdc387f...
I'm no stranger to exotic architectures and machines, having used Gentoo on a ppc64le machine as a daily driver for 3+ years. And I do like the laptop. But w/o fundamental improvements to the way ARM bringup works, not just improvements for individual machines, I wouldn't recommend this stuff to any unsuspecting user.
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This is tragic to read. An ARM-based Thinkpad ultrabook running Fedora on it would be a "forever" device for me. I adore my X1 Carbon Gen7 but the battery life could definitely be better and I could stand for it to run a little cooler.
I also have an X13s and it's also the best laptop I've owned... Sort of.
I ran Windows on it up until a few months ago and it was as you said, delightful. Long battery life, fanless, great size, great screen. I put Ubuntu on it (where they've mainlined a good bit of things), and it's still just not very good. Sleep doesn't work (and never will without Qualcomm), certain things still just crash on occasion -- but I do think the webcam works.
I'll likely put Windows back on at some point, which is a shame, because the laptop is great, but Windows is terrible. I simply do not believe any claims Qualcomm has about future support, as much as I'd love to see a newer Thinkpad device with full ARM support.
Whew, thank you for this summary. I just got this laptop as it seemed to have "good" Linux potential, but I've been stuck so far. And as further caution to others, hibernate doesn't work on Linux, and audio is glitchy. Even on windows 11 pro the shutdown menu is missing. It seems to sleep on windows but not sure about battery drain, which is reported to be 1-2%/hr in Linux.
This makes me pretty sad. But I'm still hoping i can have a linux arm laptop in my lifetime; maybe in 10-20 years.
> I don't think that ARM Laptops have a chance in Linux land as long as each model requires stuff like a custom DT.
Why? In theory the UEFI firmware can pass Linux a devicetree. Not much different to different laptops having different ACPI tables.
This sounds like a terrible situation, but I wonder if a weekend of Claude iterating could improve on any of these problems. They seem to have been pretty successful on the Mac M series.
I've been working on embedded systems using iMX8s, and it's equally awful. You have to maintain your own fork of UBoot. You have to spend hours tweaking device trees. The "NXP" kernel is out of date and never updated, the mainline kernel is missing loads of drivers.
Meanwhile in x86 land you can just download a distro and boot it. Secure boot works out of the box. It's night and day.