Daily driving Snapdragon X Elite with postmarketOS (Yoga Slim 7x)

vscode, fastfetch and GNOME settings on the Slim 7x

I've spent a weekend so far with the Slim 7x, getting postmarketOS up and running and trying to document the process as well as taking the chance to try daily driving a musl-based distro.

Overall bringup was fairly straightforward, the serial port is exposed via some nicely labelled testpads under the SSD which certainly made things a whole lot easier.

Bringup and installation

The hardest part was figuring out all the right modules that need to be included in the initramfs for the display and USB to work (plug keyboard for full disk encryption). This is now all described in the initial support MR https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/5801

It seems like dual booting with windows is the safest option for now, at least until we have a path forward for firmware. Currently the only way to get up to date GPU and DSP firmware is to receive them via windows update and then copy the files over to Linux (thankfully this will be semi-automated with woa-firmware-yoinker.

The whole installation process (at least what I ended up doing) is a bit convoluted but not really more difficult than your average Arch install. I'm hoping that it will become simpler as more parts of the process are automated (particularly when postmarketOS gets a proper installer for laptops).

For now it's just using the postmarketOS "Trailblazer" generic port, this uses Linux next so it's still missing some of the yet-to-be-upstreamed features, but it should get them as soon as they land.

An initial installation guide is published here: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_Yoga_Slim_7x_(lenovo-yoga-slim7x))

Experience so far

Overall this machine is great, the screen is huge and looks good, touchscreen is a nice bonus (and works just fine in Linux).

In terms of performance, it beats out my 2022 ThinkPad X1 Carbon (11th Gen) by a mile, it compiles the Linux kernel more than twice as fast and manages not to burn me in the process.

The battery life seems better too but not by as much as it should be. There's definitely a lot left on the table though, I expect this to keep improving as the kernel support matures.

What's broken? Well still quite a lot...

• Camera
• Audio
• Displayport alt mode
• Lid switch and EC support (screen stays on when the lid is shut)
• Bluetooth (tested with a patched kernel and had huge issues with audio stuttering which I suspect are firmware/driver related but haven't investigated).
• Probably more??

postmarketOS on a laptop

(bias beware! These are the thoughts of someone who is heavily involved in postmarketOS development)

For those unfamiliar, postmarketOS is traditionally oriented around running upstream Linux on mobile phones (using mainline or close-to-mainline kernels). It's based on Alpine Linux but provides nice opinionated defaults and an extensive amount of hardware support on top.

With the growing number of ARM laptops (like with the last gen ThinkPad x13s) which require various kernel patches or other tweaks it's become clear that postmarketOS has a role to play, and frankly it's becoming a pretty nice lightweight and upstream-focused distro in its own right. It still lacks an installer, so some manual intervention is needed to get from a bootable USB to bootable NVME but otherwise it provides a great stock GNOME or Plasma experience.

From a Linux users perspective, Arch Linux feels like an apt (haha) comparison, and is what I'm most familiar with. In general postmarketOS (the systemd branch anyway) feels quite similar, apk as a package manager works great, and has the benefit of never leaving orphan packages behind (there's no "recommended" or "optional" dependencies feature, so a package is either installer explicitly or as a dependency of something else). Otherwise the experience is more or less identical barring a few config files differences and that postmarketOS uses doas by default instead of sudo.

I've been running the systemd branch which is still "staging" and not quite ready for prime time yet (plenty of packages are missing systemd unit files, among other issues), but frankly it's still less frustrating than dealing with openrc. So far it's been running great :D

I didn't find vscode when I first looked on flathub via GNOME Software, but it turns out non-free packages are hidden by default heh. In the mean time I got it up and running via distrobox which needed some tinkering to get set up but integrates pretty seamlessly (using a custom terminal profile to launch zsh in the host with distrobox-exec-host).

Distrobox has its own quirks but is definitely a good thing to have set up on whenever I just need something glibc.

Overall I'm pretty excited to finally be daily driving postmarketOS and ARM64 hardware!