I am looking to get a new PC to do some hacking and some more general leisure computing (video, blogging, browsing etc) on. I mostly use Macs, but Macs have become markedly unfriendly towards Linux the last ten years or so. I have Questing running on my old Intel MacBook Pro, but would like to be able to use a desktop PC and my 4K monitor. I have seen lots of articles around on the state of Linux on the Snapdragon processor; there is a very affordable and compact Lenovo desktop using that processor being marketed right now:
I’ve been looking for articles on the state of Linux on that platform and most of what I find is about laptops and how well the built-in components work, or not. What about when the machine is a desktop? How well do USB and Bluetooth peripherals work on a desktop Snapdragon machine? What just works, what takes a bit of effort and what just doesn’t?
I was looking also for non x86 desktop. I didn’t find anything for snapdragon at the time. There was the Snapdragon X Elite Development kit, but I don’t think that went anywhere. I ended up buying (not cheap) System64 Thelio Astra using the Ampere Altra CPU. It’s not snapdragon, but it is arm64 and runs Ubuntu just fine. I’m interested to see if anything pops up for you.
Lenovo supports Linux, and sells computers with Linux preinstalled. But, not all of their models support Linux.
It would be worth contacting the Sales department of Lenovo to ask your question. They might have a laptop in your price range, maybe even the one that you want.
Dell is another OEM that supports Linux; I’m using one right now.
System 76 and a couple of others are also in on the game.
(I highly doubt the board in a desktop differs a lot from a laptop board, the snapdragon devices are all single board computers with all components on board, apart from the shape of the PCB to fit the case better I suspect the boards will be identical between desktop and laptop)