I've been running Linux for 14 months now and loving it.

My laptop is a HP Victus gaming pc, which is bulky and heavy, but Its powerfull.

I find myself laying on the couch more and developing from there half the time or doing laptop stuff more and more from the couch.

Lugging it to work and back is also not great.

In October I can buy a new laptop through work and write off half the price against tax, honestly I want everything a mac book offers.

Good solid build quality, not plastic. No GPU needed, just light weight, long battery life, shouldn't heat up too much, good trackpad etc.

But fuck apple and their walled garden, so I want something Linux.

ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it? What are my options?

Or do I just go with x86 and compromise

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[–] 3 points 6 months ago (8 children)

Gentoo supports ARM quite well (obviously), but I'm not sure what new hardware is out there that has an open enough firmware (or that can be flashed with coreboot) that will allow a Linux install.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    I am a linux beginner: Why obviously?

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Gentoo compiles everything. Like, even the command is like "compile world". It's not as straight edge as LinuxFromScratch and AFAIK they've started having precompiled packages sometime in the last few years but the core approach is that you configure compilation flags system-wide and recompile whatever needs recompilation every update

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    Yes, the source code gets compiled directly on the machine (or indirectly FOR the machine).

    This, of course, assumes one can actually boot a kernel not developed specifically for the machine.

    Some modern boot loaders / managers are locked (Asus does this a lot), so you're stuck with whatever they put on the machine.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    They're locking down kernels now?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago*

    "They" probably are, I don't know who "they" is but it's definitely not Asus (at least not their upper-end stuff). Source: bought an Asus "gaming" laptop last year and installed Linux with no issues.

    Edit: clarification on gaming laptop manufacturer (specified that it was Asus which I initially neglected to do in above comment)

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    Bootloaders are locked. Think of the bios on a PC.

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