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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • My company bought 5 snapdragon laptops to test - ended up returning all of them. They’re not bad per se, the operating system that they’re expected to run is. Windows for ARM has a looong way before it is production ready. Their biggest hurdle is the translation layer (similar to Rosetta 2 which works near flawlessly) that is so bad that if your program doesn’t have a native ARM build, you’re better off not even bothering. I’ve seen an article indicating that they improved it a lot in the current Windows insider build but we’ve already returned the laptops and switched over to AMD. In my opinion if Microsoft truly cares about Windows on ARM then it will be ready in a year or so. If they don’t… probably 2-3.

    As per Linux, it works great, but that’s because most of the packages are FOSS and so compiling them for ARM doesn’t take a lot of effort. Sadly, Security at our company insists we run Windows so that spyware antivirus software can be installed on all end user machines.











  • Note: I’m not from the US, so in a lot of cases going to a manufacturer’s website and purchasing computers is not an option. Resellers are still the ones in charge here.

    I work IT and when it time for a hardware refresh the reseller we are in contact with said they don’t stock AMD as there’s no demand. Which in a way creates a chicken and egg problem. I asked them if it would be possible to get laptops with AMD chips and the reseller said yes but we have to wait. So we bought 4 Intel machines for the meantime and placed a custom order for ones with AMD chips. The ThinkPads we are buying are significantly cheaper if they come with AMD chips, I was honestly a bit baffled there was no demand. Regardless, we are happy with the purchase and so are the users who claim the computers are relatively cooler than their Intel 8th gen predecessors. It just goes to show that for the most part, enterprise makes a huge chunk of the desktop market share nowadays (as younger generations tend to simply not use a computer and do everything on their phone) and that market just isn’t ready for the transition yet. They’ve been going strong with Intel for about 30-40 years. Weening of that tit is gonna take some time.