Is there a good linux ARM laptop, fanless ?
You won't find anything like the Macbook Air M1 in build quality, display, and battery life
Thinkpad X13s and T14s (both with Snapdragon) are the best closest alternative.
Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
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Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#12Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…
> Things I learned to look out for:
Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.
When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.
They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.
There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.
I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#13Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#14> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.
The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.
Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#15In my opinion, touching anything made by Fujitsu is not ethical.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#16Is there a good linux ARM laptop, fanless ?
I’d be interested in this as well. I want a quiet machine with a decent display and a long battery life. Right now the MacBook Air checks those boxes but I’d be very interested in an alternative that I can throw Linux / OpenBSD on.
My Ryzen framework 13 is silent almost all the times, except gaming and processing map tiles.
Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#17Is there a good linux ARM laptop, fanless ?
A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect.
I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30 tok/sec with smaller Gemma models (had to install mesa vulkan drivers from debian-backports for GPU support in the VM).
If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1506894/how-to-install-ubunt...
Another Chromebook with the same setup is the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514.
Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#18TL;DR: When in doubt, update the BIOS before doing anything else.
Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#19Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…
I'm using Linux on some dell precision and camera just don't work. It's possible to install some custom kernel to make it work, but the pain of maintaining it by myself in comparison to IT department supported setup is a no go.
Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
#20> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation. The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS t…
But what happened doesn't make sense even. Why would upgrading the BIOS suddenly restore the option to toggle Secure Boot? If the previous owner (assuming, some company) disabled this, why would it be so trivial (comparatively) to work around it?