What Valve Has Been Working on

While you might not relate to this my friends on our discord server keep thinking the Steam Frame is going to release tomorrow for the last week. While Everyone is hoping that the Steam Frame is at a competitive price. My hope is that this kick starts a wave of Linux laptops

The Best thing valve has been working on along side the open source community is FEX-Emu. FEX-Emu allows for x86 programs to run on Arm via emulation.

The State of Arm on Linux

While the Linux kernel has had support for ARM since 2002 app and distro support for it has been up and down. While arm has gained popularity in servers, and a bit of growth in laptops with windows on Arm. The support of apps on Arm has been the major issues because while in a server you would only run 5 applications max. Personal computers would have 20-100+ applications installed, much like people switching from Windows if one app does not work that can be a deal breaker.

The big layer with Linux ARM support is Raspberry Pi. Which due to being the controller of the software and hardware, similar to Apple they have a more curated experience. While Raspberry Pi's are amazing they don't have the best performance compared to what you get in other ARM chips.

What Would Run Natively

For my main computer I am running fedora with KDE plasma and try to install everything from the Discover store. To test what percentage of apps would work natively run on ARM. I told Gemini to, "Run though everything I have installed in the Discover store and to tell me what percentage would run natively or ARM."

In the end I had 122 GUI apps installed and 116 had ARM support. This was higher than I was expecting, but if one of the apps you need does not support ARM it's a big deal breaker.

If you want to check your go to this repo: https://github.com/MicahWade/discover-arm-checker

Perfect ARM Discover Store

As a user of KDE with Fedora the Discover store is how I install everything. It's also the reason if someone asks more for a distro choice I recommend Fedora with KDE because everything is so easy to install.

Now that we know why the Discover Store is so good, how can we make it even better on ARM? To start with if you are installing it on ARM CPU the first time you open the store, the store could ask you if it should use FEX-Emu for apps that don't have ARM support. This means whenever you are searching for something it should show up as an option. Because this would be for less than 10% of apps the small performance hit will be negligible. This would mean that it feels like any other Linux computer.

Future Thought

With the most likely success of the Steam Frame I see there being more arm laptops coming to market. While they may not be Linux the support and money Microsoft is putting into windows on ARM will make companies more comfortable developing ARM laptop.

While there have been some Linux ARM laptops like the Argon ONE it uses a Raspberry Pi CM5 computer board. While this is good it's not at the performance levels most people expect from a laptop. Another option for a Linux ARM laptop is putting Linux on a Windows on ARM laptop. The current issue is while there has been great work adding compatibility for the snapdragon chips, it's not ready for day to day work yet.

If you want a Linux ARM laptop and a CM5 does not give the enough performance, the best option in my opinion is the ARM Framework main board made by MetaComputing. But this board is not officially supported by Framework and is less efficient than other board options by Framework. But if you need ARM because of the work you do on your laptop, it's the best option. In 1-3 years I can easily see Framework having an official board that has an ARM processor, this I could see most likely coming to the Framework 12 first.

While this is great there is always RISC-V to consider as in a few years it could be competitive to ARM. If RISC-V is even just competitive with ARM not having to pay licensing cost could see it become the king.