back to article Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there

The latest release of Armbian helps with the non-trivial problem of installing and running an arbitrary Linux distro on Arm computers. The Lenovo Thinkpad X13S Generation 1 which we reviewed back in March is the first mainstream Arm-powered laptop that the Reg FOSS Desk has got to evaluate. There are other Arm-based laptops …

  1. karlkarl Silver badge

    We all know how this works in ARM-land. The day it is properly supported by a useful OS, is the day that Lenovo drops support for the laptop and Qualcomm drops support for the chip.

    Then we put it in our tech gizmo cupboard; never to be used again and go back to using our decade old Intel ThinkPads.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      You forgot the next step: and then the image is frozen and that kernel, and that one only, is the one you need to run this laptop. Somewhere in a forum is a person who claims that mainline 6.23 will run and you only have to follow this twenty-step process involving two anonymous git repos and an existing functional image to swap it in. At the bottom past the steps is a link which goes to a forum post which explains that, if you do that, the screen unavoidably switches off every ten minutes and the USB ports only work at 2.0 speeds, but you can fix the former with a script which keeps the screen working by disabling power management.

      Sometimes, I wonder why we bother making and using all the ARM-powered Linux devices. Only a few are at all comparable to what Linux on X64 and X86 is like, and the best of them still tend to have a few problems. No, that hasn't stopped me having quite a few of them myself, but my primary machines still have Intel or AMD processors in them.

      1. eswan

        Sounds like the process for accelerated poulsbo (GMA500) graphics.

      2. karlkarl Silver badge

        > which keeps the screen working by disabling power management.

        Hah, yes. Full brightness blasting out the LCD, generating loads of heat via the efifb fallback driver and CPU rendering. Classic!

        It is sad to see this with most ports to foreign hardware. They go 75% the way there but often can't get any further. I am actually largely surprised this hasn't happened with the Apple aarch64 platform.

      3. david bates

        You forgot the obligatory "Why would you want to do that anyway? You should be doing THIS, which does not give you the result you're after but I misunderstood the question"

    2. Never10_use_Puppylinux

      Running Ubuntu Desktop on Arm-based laptops Nov 3 2023 Riga Latvia,

      ubuntu Summit 2023 This should provide some answers

      Running Ubuntu Desktop on Arm-based laptops

      Nov 3, 2023, 5:30 PM

      Speaker

      Gordan Markus Canonical

      Description

      In this talk, the speaker will introduce the history of running Ubuntu Desktop on Arm-based platforms, the challenges, and the learnings. Additionally, we will zoom in on the current state of the ecosystem, and the enabled devices with a focus on Lenovo's Thinkpad X13s. The Lenovo X13s features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 system-on-chip, and due to the incredible work of the community, the upstream kernel support has progressed immensely in the past year.

      The Linux community has been eagerly waiting for a fully Linux-supported Arm-based desktop solution, and today, we are closer to that goal more than ever! We would like to use this opportunity to bring the community together on this journey, recognize our key partners and call everyone to action in providing us with feedback. Last but not least, we would like to share with you our plans and exciting news!

      No answer to this guy on Install Ubuntu on Arm Lenovo Ideapad 4 , snapdragon-8c. Win some, lose Some

      Fred Finster porting GhostBSD.org MATE or XFCE desktop BSD to ARM64 Presently running on Raspberry Pi 4B w/ 8G

      FreeBSD where to download RPI snapshot image to write into USB flash drive.

  2. Pete Sdev
    Meh

    Still lots to do

    Once the OS is working properly, there's still the question of software support.

    E.g., watching DRM- encumbered video, such as Netflix.

    I believe there is a way to get this working on ARM+Linux (e.g. on a Raspberry PI) but it involves some fiddling.

    I also wonder what the graphics performance is like at this stage.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Still lots to do

      [Author here]

      > E.g., watching DRM- encumbered video, such as Netflix.

      I wouldn't know, I'm afraid. I have no paid streaming accounts of any kind. I actually buy physical CDs and DVDs of stuff I want to own. Weird, I know, but nobody can revoke it, and there's no question of licensing. If it doesn't survive an EMP strike and you can't hold it in your hand, you don't own it.

      Youtube works.

      > I also wonder what the graphics performance is like at this stage.

      I didn't specifically look at GPU performance, but it feels fast. I ran some CPU benchmarks and it did well, both single-threaded and with 4 threads (as it has 4 performance cores). It was up around fast Core i7 level.

      But really, given the price point, neither CPU nor GPU performance is the point here. This is still very much at the stage of "does it work at all?" and not "how quick is it?" And indeed "does the battery charge? Can I tell?" rather than "what is the battery life like?"

      It's a premium-priced, super-thin super-light, all-solid-state laptop with no cooling fans, totally silent, and it can run for about a day -- not a working day, as in a "how long can you stay awake?" day. As in, I'm in a crisis, I have no reliable internet, but I have to keep working until this is done. Some 16-24 hours on a single charge, and unlike a Chromebook, it's usable with no internet connection, and has fast local storage.

      If you care about CPU performance but not what CPU, buy a MacBook.

      If you care about CPU performance but need x86, Lenovo has other models to help you, and I reviewed the X1 Carbon.

      If you need a Windows machine, this will do. There are a handful of native Arm64 Windows apps, and unlike in the Windows RT era, you can have full native desktop apps, and Windows Store apps, and run what you want without jailbreaking.

      *But* there are not many and Microsoft has, in a very on-brand way, solved the problem of Windows on Arm64 the worst possible way: It emulates x86-32 and x86-64, through two different code paths I believe, and you can't tell which is which, or turn it off, and there is no way to be sure you're running native code. Task Manager will tell you if it's a 32-bit or 64-bit task but not if it's an x86 or Arm task. There's \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 with the 64-bit binaries in it, and no way to tell if they're x86 or Arm binaries.

      It's a mess and I think it's because, like MacOS 8.5-9.2, most of the OS is still code for the old architecture running in emulation and they don't want to own up to that fact.

      Marketing defeats technology, once again.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Still lots to do

        "I wouldn't know, I'm afraid. I have no paid streaming accounts of any kind. I actually buy physical CDs and DVDs of stuff I want to own. Weird, I know, but nobody can revoke it, and there's no question of licensing. If it doesn't survive an EMP strike and you can't hold it in your hand, you don't own it."

        1000 time this ^^^

        Cannot understand why people buy the *right* to *own* stuff on someone elses computer, when the so called ownership can be *lost* when the license deal is revoked.

        It happened many times with music in the past and yet people still *buy* something which is really 'borrowed' rather than 'owned' !!!

        I also own CD/DVD/etc and have them saved as .ISO images or .mp4 'conversions' for backup.

        :)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Cannot understand ...

          For myself, there are many films and TV series that I don't want to keep re-watching, and even for the exceptions the re-watch intervals tends to be of the order of decades.So I usually don't feel I particularly /need/ a copy, and in such cases a streaming service is fine. But if a copy is "needed", then indeed I do buy it.

          For music, I do tend to buy, but then I also use that more traditional streaming service known as "the radio" :-)

        2. ianbetteridge

          Re: Still lots to do

          Mostly I don’t particularly want to watch streamed stuff more than a couple of times, so buying it is just creating more physical clutter.

          As for music, most digital files you buy are unemcumbered by DRM these days, and again for me CDs are just clutter.

        3. Proton_badger

          Re: Still lots to do

          Agreed, if you specifically buy to own it should not be online only. Though let's not mix it up: streaming services like Netflix is more like video rental and one doesn't have to watch much in a month for it to be quite a good deal compared to old fashioned rental, for those who prefer that over buy-to-own.

      2. dharmOS

        Re: Still lots to do

        Hi Liam

        Running a sometimes sluggish Qualcomm 7c ARM64 PC (Apcsilmic Dot 1), and the Win 11 task manager does tell you which code path is running. I cannot paste screenshots inline images but on the "Details" tab, you need to select , or show the Architecture column and it will tell you x86, x64 or Arm64 or even for MS Office, Foobar 2000, ARM64 EC [as Arm64 (x64 compatible)].

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Still lots to do

        >> It was up around fast Core i7 level.

        Considering that there are 13 generations of Core i7 processors spanning more than 10 years, amongst which also a few ULV variants which have been slow even back when they were released, this isn't really a useful statement.

        And Passmark suggests that the kind of Core i7 that performs as fast as the Snapdragon 8cx G3 is more like an older, lower performance exemplar (like the i7-8565UC, a 15W TDP ULV CPU)

        >> and unlike a Chromebook, it's usable with no internet connection, and has fast local storage.

        So has my Chromebook (hint: not all Chromebooks have slow and small eMMC storage), and it works just fine even when there's no internet connection (G apps have been able to work offline for ages, and the apps installed into the Linux container work all just fine without network connection).

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Still lots to do

          [Author here]

          > this isn't really a useful statement.

          That's why I didn't put it into the article.

          I know that ChromeBooks let you do some stuff locally. Even so, a full local OS with no mandatory cloud connections at all is, I submit, more versatile.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Still lots to do

            You may not have put it in the article, but you did put it into your comment and it wasn't more useful there. If you intend to compare processors, you generally have to be specific enough to avoid ambiguity. Not bothering to find a comparison is also valid if it's not important, which may have been the case for your article.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Still lots to do

            >> I know that ChromeBooks let you do some stuff locally.

            Actually, it's a bit more than just "some stuff", you can pretty much do anything that by nature doesn't require a connection to the internet. Something it shares with pretty much every other desktop/laptop OS.

            >> Even so, a full local OS with no mandatory cloud connections at all is, I submit, more versatile.

            Well, ChromeOS also comes with a full Debian 11 container, which I guess qualifies as "full local OS", and it doesn't have any mandatory cloud connections.

      4. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Still lots to do

        "But really, given the price point, neither CPU nor GPU performance is the point here."

        This doesn't mean the same thing to me that it appears to mean to you. If I said something like that, it means that the price is low, so a weak CPU is acceptable. You later admit that it's a premium price, and some searching indicates that this price is $1099 US, although the UK site seems to suggest that it's £711 at the moment (probably without VAT, it doesn't say and discounted from £1579 so the prices are all over the place). At prices like that, I have various options for more powerful machines, and something else will have to make the deciding factor. From your brief comments, battery life would seem like the best bet for that distinguishing factor.

        "There's \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 with the 64-bit binaries in it, and no way to tell if they're x86 or Arm binaries."

        The GUI should contain something to help, but finding out which architecture a binary is is pretty easy if you're willing to run a script. The executables indicate their architecture in the PE header, and if you don't want to parse that yourself you can use a command like file (available on every OS though Windows will need a manual installation) which will do it for you and give you the answer. I would prefer that Microsoft add that to the GUI, although I expect that they'd point out that anyone who knows what that difference entails probably knows enough to do that check.

      5. karlkarl Silver badge

        Re: Still lots to do

        > Weird, I know, but nobody can revoke it, and there's no question of licensing. If it doesn't survive an EMP strike and you can't hold it in your hand, you don't own it.

        I am of the same opinion. However, I assume you don't mirror the entire repository of packages for the Linux distro you are running do you? Ultimately, the slurping from package servers still has the same issues (other than being revoked), unless you have it on your physical disk, it could be made inaccessible at any time.

      6. jglathe

        Re: Still lots to do

        task manager shows x86, x64, Arm, Arm64, Arm64EC and I assume also Arm64X processes. The OS itself is completely Arm64 AFAICT. The only processes running other Intel archs are some Office helper stuff (Office including Teams is ARM64EC), other small tools, Lenovo Vantage. and some SQL Server stuff brought in from Visual Studio (I guess). Except for EM Client, miniTool Shadowmaker and FreeCommander/XE all software I want to use is available as Arm64. It improves steadily.

  3. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Pepperidge farm remembers

    Remember when x86 laptops came peripherals that required vendor supplied binaries to run Linux?

    Remember being called a long haired beatnik for insisting on hardware supported by open source Linux drivers?

    Remember vendors not updating their binary drivers so hardware was stuck on a geriatric kernel version?

    I took one look at 'snapdragon' and all those memories came flooding back from my days as a PFY. Qualcom will have to get a massive reputational makeover before I even consider checking one their products for proper drivers that will not consign hardware to the junk heap in two years.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

      [Author here]

      > I took one look at 'snapdragon' and all those memories came flooding back from my days as a PFY.

      This is a very valid point.

      OTOH, this is if not quite a unique product, but a very unusual one. If you want a RISC-powered laptop computer, you have 3 options:

      * an Arm ChromeBook -- cheap, works, needs a Google account and internet access;

      * a MacBook/Air/Pro -- expensive, fast, so far still needs to run macOS;

      * The X13S. Runs the business standard OS, and now, as of roughly the middle of last month, can just about usefully run Linux too.

      As such, I think it's significant.

      This is not the only machine, or the only manufacturer, using the SC8280 SoC (to use its real internal name). The MS Surface Pro X, Samsung Galaxy Book S and Lenovo Flex 5G among others. An SoC is effectively something quite close to an entire motherboard, so improving support for any individual one of these devices improves the support for all of them (at least via some adjustments).

      There are industry rumours *that I cannot substantiate* that Qualcomm has Microsoft tied into a contract. If true, for now, this is *the* premium Windows-on-Arm64 SoC. As such we will see more Windows computers based around them. If they can run Linux, for me anyway that makes them a lot more attractive, and I am sure I am not alone!

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

        "If you want a RISC-powered laptop computer"

        This, as I see it, is the problem. There are a lot of people with strong opinions about ISAs who appear to have ideological points for their preference which aren't really connected to any benefit. Preferring an ARM computer because of battery life makes some sense, but preferring it because it's RISC does not help. These opinions vary. Some people, for example, are incredibly excited about RISC-V and want it in everything, right now, even though they appear to have no idea why it would be helpful and in some cases are under the false belief that it will mean advantages for open source software which it will not bring. If you want a RISC laptop for its own sake, it might be worth considering why that helps you. If you don't have an answer, you may be wasting your time and resources on something you wouldn't benefit from if you succeeded.

        1. martinusher Silver badge

          Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

          RISC-V offers freedom from planned obsolescence. Its a bit early to put it in the daily driver laptop but its only a matter of time -- and when that time comes I will be among the first to jump ship.

          A lot of software development effort seems to be either preventing something from working or providing workarounds to deal with something that should work but doesn't. An early example of this sort of thing was music players --- in theory this is one of the simplest applications you could write and early examples were indeed simple and reliable. Then came the push to 'monetize' them. I've seen this with countless other products, be it straightforward office type applications ("How many different ways can we make incompatible file formats?"), support for 'things' that obviously has to go through a cloudy website complete with user registration and dependence on manufacturer integrity. Its a mess, and there's a good chance that if someone produced an "honest" platform, OS and applications suite that people would gravitate towards it. (Corporate would be kept shackled to Windows, of course -- marketing effort is now a bit like the old mainframe days of FUD.)

          The thing is, in order to move computing forward we've got to stop chasing our intellectual tails and focus on the hard task of actually moving forward -- not bigger, faster, more and more but learning how to use what we have got efficiently. This was a focus many years ago when computers were puny but its got lost in the wash with faster/bigger/more. But we can't keep doing this for ever and if we accidentally incentivize some entity with significant resources to find ways to use stuff efficiently then our current businesses are going to be in deep caca.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

            "RISC-V offers freedom from planned obsolescence."

            Why do you think that? RISC-V processors will get faster like any others, and software designed to run on them will do as all software does and grow to fit the resources available. Devices with the first range of RISC-V processors will eventually be too slow to run the latest software, just as ones in other ISAs do. If it's about the ISA in general, they don't really go bad. This is evident from the fact that you can still run RISC OS on a modern ARM chip or DOS on a modern X86 one. The reason those systems don't run flawlessly are due to the many other pieces of hardware they don't support, not the CPUs refusing to support or run them. RISC-V will become obsolete in the same ways and about as fast as other ISAs, and if I had to point to a difference, the main one is the ease of adding proprietary extensions to it, which if it happens too much, means that RISC-V will become obsolete faster as people adopt extensions that weren't in the original system. I'm curious to hear your reasons, because I think this is one of those incorrect assumptions I was talking about.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not worth looking at it

    ... and the machine has no built-in Ethernet port.

    No ethernet port?

    *Not* worth the time needed to look it up, more so with that price tag.

    .

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Not worth looking at it

      [Author here]

      > No ethernet port?

      I specifically called that out in the 1st article on the X13S. I linked to it from this one. It is always worth following all the links in my stories: I put them in because they provide essential background info.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not worth looking at it

        Hello:

        ... specifically called that out in the 1st article on the X13S ...

        Indeed.

        You did but I did not say you didn't.

        Or did I? 8^P

        Piss aside, I actually went to your original article and read it again to make sure I remembered that it was so.

        So I'll stand by my comment: this X13s thingy is not worth looking at.

        It is expensive for what it is and what you can do with it.

        Linux distribution or not.

        Have a great week-end.

        .

        1. Lon24

          Re: Not worth looking at it

          Might it be that building the relatively bulky ethernet port into an ultra-slim laptop is challenging? Plus only us odd-bods ever connect a laptop by cable these days. Plus, of course, we probably already have a USB-C/RJ45 adaptor in the drawer together with a lot of other adaptors that we felt vital at the time but now gather dust.

          While one could argue that Lenovo know an ARM base laptop is, as yet, aimed at a specialist market who like sticking plugs in for speed and security. But like cars, small volume niche products are usually built or based on one of their standard platform designs which define the case mouldings to keep development cost/unit from going stratospheric.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: Not worth looking at it

            "Plus only us odd-bods ever connect a laptop by cable these days."

            Agreed. There a re number of client sites I visit where the open plan office is entirely and exclusively WiFi enabled. Whether that's a good or bad thing, I can't really say. It works for them and the argument put to me is that it's massively cheaper to install in a new build or moving to a new site. WAPs and wiring above the ceiling tiles and no wall sockets in the wrong places, no expensive re-wiring when re-arranging the office layout for new or existing clients, no fly-leads to get tangled, tripped over or generally damaged and need replacing yet again.

            I'm not sure I'm happy with that as an overall, long term solution, but the argument for initial install cost and short/medium term (at least) maintenance seems valid and I'm sure it pleases the bean counters :-)

  5. steelpillow Silver badge

    the non-trivial problem of installing and running an arbitrary Linux distro on Arm

    So all we need now is help with the non-trivial problem of installing and running RISC OS on Arm computers.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: the non-trivial problem of installing and running an arbitrary Linux distro on Arm

      [Author here]

      > the non-trivial problem of installing and running RISC OS on Arm computers.

      I think for now there are 2 realistic options.

      Buy a PineBook:

      https://www.riscoscomputers.co.uk/Pinebok.shtml

      Or get an Elecrow CrowPi 2:

      https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/18/review_elecrow_crowpi2/

      Or CrowPi L:

      https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/25/crowpi_l_raspberry_pi_laptop_review/

      1. steelpillow Silver badge

        Re: the non-trivial problem of installing and running an arbitrary Linux distro on Arm

        H'mm. Is that Pinebok WiFi driver open source?

  6. Mostly Irrelevant

    I considered buying one of these laptops last year but the price isn't much lower than a MacBook Air and as a platform for Linux, the MacBook Air is more powerful and gets better battery life. So I bought a MacBook Air instead.

  7. Jason Hindle Silver badge

    I'm surprised something like Armbian is needed.

    Running under Parallels on my M1 Pro MacBook, an ARM build of Ubuntu just works. I had (wrongly) assumed said same distribution would simply install on a (none Apple) ARM PC.

    Software can be a problem... I don't think there is anything like Rosetta (or its perfectly decent Windows equivalent) for Linux. If a thing hasn't been ported then you don't get to have that thing.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: I'm surprised something like Armbian is needed.

      [Author here]

      > I had (wrongly) assumed said same distribution would simply install on a (none Apple) ARM PC.

      Nope. There is no baseline, no compatibility standard.

      There are servers which are, I understand, a bit more standardised -- standard UEFI, standard storage, etc. -- but nobody's offered me one to play with. So long as you can get some base-level type-1 hypervisor on it, then you can run whatever you like in VMs, because the guest OS isn't talking to the real hardware, but imaginary virtualised stuff. That's quite standardised across hypervisors.

      RasPis don't have UEFI. They don't have traditional firmware at all. The GPU is the main controlling processor, not the Arm. The GPU runs MS ThreadX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

      Proprietary sealed black box.

      The Arm cores are slave devices to the GPU, roughly speaking.

      Arm ChromeBooks run Coreboot, not UEFI. No Arm device has a BIOS as such.

      Compared to Intel, all RISC boxes are the Wild West. Each one a fiercely independent little city-state, next to no federal government or interconnections between each spikily fenced little camp.

      AIUI Arm Ltd _encourages_ Arm64 vendors to use UEFI but it's not enforced and upgrades from existing designs skip it.

      > anything like Rosetta for Linux

      Arm Linux on an Arm64 Mac in a VM can call Rosetta2 on the host OS to run x86-64 binaries.

      https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/09/apple_linux_support_macos/

      Natively, no, there isn't.

      > (or its perfectly decent Windows equivalent)

      The thing is, Rosetta2 is a choice and it's not built in. MacOS is 100% native Arm64 code. Rosetta2 is an optional extra you get offered the first time you try to run an x86-64 binary.

      Windows has, AFAICT, 1 x86-32 translator and a separate x86-64 translator. (Public info is scant.)

      They're integrated and I am fairly confident substantial chunks of Win11 on Arm are still shipped as x86-64 code.

      That, IMHO, is not "perfectly decent". It is a terrible idea.

  8. nautica Silver badge
    Happy

    Lenovo Thinkpad X13S Generation 1: really made by Pine Microcomputer?

    From the article--"There are other Arm-based laptops out there, such as Pine64's Pinebook Pro..."

    I simply don't understand you, Proven. You obviously have the tech-writer's equivalent of a death-wish. You keep mentioning Pine Microcomputer (twice--at least--in this article; other articles you have written), as if it was not the epitome--the textbook definition--of what a sleazy supplier is and how one acts. Pine has NOT changed its stripes, nor its business model. It continues to churn out hardware with absolutely no reasonable software support: no initial working software, and very most certainly no on-going software support. Its 'customer service' continues to be the dictionary definition of "oxymoron".

    Oh, wait...I, like St. Paul, just had an epiphany---

    The Lenovo Thinkpad X13S Generation 1--no ethernet port, no numeric pad in the keyboard, VERY, VERY hard to install any Linux operating system, ad nauseum...

    What have we just described here folks? Riiight; a laptop designed and offered for sale by--wait for it--Pine Microcomputer ! !

    But..to be fair, the Pinebook Pro--which one can't get to work--does have an embedded numeric keypad and a magnesium-alloy case; and the X13S--which one can't get to work, either--does cost a whole lot more; a real improvement over the Pinebook Pro, wouldn't you say?

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Lenovo Thinkpad X13S Generation 1: really made by Pine Microcomputer?

      [Author here]

      Not pulling out any one line to quote.

      I do not own any Thinkpad new enough to have a chiclet keyboard. All mine came used, many for free, if not then very cheaply. (And all have full-travel 7-row keyboards.)

      All mine have USB 2, DisplayPort etc. Some have eSATA. Some have USB3. All have removable batteries. Stuff like that matters to me.

      I do not own a PineBook or any Pine hardware. I would like a RISC OS laptop and theirs is the only offering, but that's all. The thing is, though, in their sector, there's nothing else quite like them and they're cheap.

      I do not own, and TBH would not want, this X13S or the X1 Carbon or the Z13 I've also reviewed. I don't like their keyboards, I don't like their lack of ports, I don't like their sealed designs where I can't take 'em apart and fix and upgrade them, _cheaply_.

      And I repeatedly say this, in the Reg and elsewhere. So do Iain Thompson and others.

      I criticise the things you're criticising, and yet I -- what -- don't do it enough?

      What do you want?

  9. chuckufarley Silver badge

    Everytime there is a new Armbian release...

    ...I constantly cringe and wince as I figure out which kernel security function got the axe. Oof course that aren't as bad as the Hardkernel team, but who in the software world is?

  10. jglathe

    Hmm. Got it running here, more or less impressed

    Actually, I eyed purchasing one for quite a while, and after some experience with the Windows Dev Kit 2023 on Win11 and with WSL - and getting *that* thing to boot Linux, but not from USB - I bought an X13s, model 21BX001LGE. Windows11 runs nicely, as expected, with the usual settings BS, but it runs well. Most software I need for a hobby machine is already available as ARM64 or ARM64EC - great.

    It also runs the aforementioned Armbian 6.3.13, and it does so from SSD. To be fair, to install I actually removed the SSD to an external enclosure (before backing it up completely with miniTool ShadowMaker), did the gparted and other stuff on a wdk2023 (also ARM64, but a RPi4 will also do nicely). Hand-wired the grub start menu accordingly, and it boots and updates as it should. It also boots from USB, although there's still some issues. Didn't come around to the qcom-battmgr userspace component and the ALSA userspace configuration yet. It's fairly usable already.

    Regarding ongoing development, the x13s allowed me to crack that USB booting issue on the wdk2023, and I have that running on 6.5.2 already with sound and some power management issues the remaining big blocks (if you don't count nxp and kvm support, which can be way harder). 6.5 has almost all changes required to run either, you mostly need the device trees to boot it. So... not bad?

  11. mark l 2 Silver badge

    If companies such as Lenovo where to offer a Linux build for the devices they sell in the first place, it wouldn't need the volunteers at places like Armbian to try and build Linux for them. So Kudos to those members of the Armbian site for putting in all the hard work.

    As for the lack of sound on the Thinkpad under Armbian, Ive seen that before on other devices with Armbian on them where it was outputting to a dummy device rather than the real hardware, and a tweak of the audio setting fixed it.

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