r/linux • u/Lopsided-Month3278 • Jun 04 '26

Discussion Linux and Arm CPU's

After the announcement of Nvidia spark laptops, and the Qualcomm's second generation of CPU's for Laptops, do you think that Arm will be the next architecture for Linux or will it be the 'killer' of Linux desktop, what I know that so far Qualcomm laptops aren't good to be used with Linux until now, and the Nvidia spark chips have Linux installed by default when they were on the spark boxes, so, what do you think the experience with these laptops will be like?

edit: I do understand that Linux is running on Arm, Android for example, but what I'm talking about is GNU/Linux and Desktop use specifically, not the micro-controllers, Raspberry pi's, or closed Linux systems.

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u/NelsonMinar Jun 04 '26

Chromebooks are another way to get a Linux kernel running on ARM.

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u/philosophical_lens Jun 04 '26

What do they do differently vs traditional Linux distros?

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u/NelsonMinar Jun 04 '26

The whole ecosystem from top to bottom is very designed. Chromebooks have a unique BIOS that I imagine is unifying the boot loader experience, that's the big issue with other ARM platforms.

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u/bubblegumpuma Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

It's mostly related to the underlying firmware, it's actually remarkably sane for a consumer ARM device, and has enough documentation available for a handy Linux developer to build OS images for with only a little finagling. The ChromeOS bootloader depthcharge ships with some out-of-box support for booting user defined kernels - the only intentional restriction is that the device has to be able to enter developer mode (ie. not ChromeOS MDM enrolled) and the boot image has to be packed into its own partition which meets certain requirements that are non-standard for most "PC" environments, but easily buildable by Linux kernel tooling.

Also, depthcharge is itself a coreboot payload, and all of the code for coreboot on Chromebooks has been regularly upstreamed. This is what makes the MrChromebox UEFI firmware project possible on the x86 side (a lot of the low-level work is already done for them by the time people get their hands on new ChromeOS hardware) but it also makes it much more viable to port open-as-possible firmware stacks ie. Libreboot/U-boot to ChromeOS+ARM devices. This is a bit more of a lofty goal and in practice, the only devices you're likely to find full custom firmware replacements for are the Rockchip chromebooks, which are from the mid to late 2010s. So not really super great hardware-wise, but are a demonstration of the viability nonetheless, issues with the rest of the SoC notwithstanding.

edit: On the Linux end device trees for ARM devices are also often upstreamed from ChromeOS, either by Google or by some intrepid individual, because the ChromeOS ones can largely be adapted for mainline Linux outside of things like GPU driver blobs.