Microsoft & Qualcomm -- Blame for Broken Arm Promises?

I'm honestly amazed the Snapdragon Dev Kit is still not here... it seemed like the key component to getting devs to start working on their Arm builds for Windows. It feels like Microsoft shot first, and everyone's asking questions later—the consumer laptops shouldn't have launched yet with the state of Windows on Arm and Qualcomm Snapdragon X support today. So far I haven't found a person who bought a Snapdragon X and said "this laptop is so much better" yet. When Apple launched the M-series laptops, tons of people felt like it was a completely different and better experience than the laptops that came before.

"We support Linux since we dont want to use Windows ourself..." Thank you sir!

Getting ads in an OS I paid for. Getting nagged about OneDrive. Search failing to exist as a functional part of the OS. Periphs trying to auto launch and install software. Recall. I made the switch to Linux. It works. It does what I want. It doesn't pester me. I have not booted into Windows in weeks. I'm debating on if I even need it installed on my next major build.

I'm an IT professional and I've been a Windows user since 3.1 / 386 days (about 30 years) and have just switched to Linux Mint. This vid is spot on. I'm sick of the data mining, the ads, the burying of privacy toggles, the erosion (or constant overriding) of user choice. Recall was the final straw for me (even though I'm not buying one of those PCs, and even though MS reneged on its being on by default) because the mere fact they tried to launch such a feature tells me something about the kind of company they have become; quite simply, a company no longer listening to users, that doesn't respect our choices or opinions, and one that has therefore forfeited my trust.

If battery life and sleep were the main issues - desktop users wouldn't be pissed about Windows too. The main issue with Windows is that Microsoft is still coasting on the last time they had put in any thought and creativity. W11 is just Vista in 5 trenchcoats, the outermost one having ad posters glued onto its back.

I'm a professional developer for a game engine. Porting to Windows on ARM was trivial for us. Literally just added the ARM64 build configuration to the projects, it built first try, ran first try, hasn't had any ARM-specific bugs. Basically free. We have published games that have ARM64 ports running fine. The real holdup is the Xbox stuff - Microsoft has failed to port their Xbox game platform stuff to ARM64, and you can see this for example in how Minecraft Bedrock Edition has an ARM32 port but not an ARM64 port. Their latest and greatest "Game Development Kit" still does not have any ARM support (not even through emulation), whereas UWP has supported ARM32 and ARM64 and emulation for years. It is baffling. So, porting games to ARM64 is trivial right up until you want to actually integrate with Xbox Live on PC, at which point you're stuck waiting for Microsoft to port their stuff. For a long time I thought the Qualcomm exclusivity deal was what was holding back Microsoft, but it seems they're both failing each other since it was Qualcomm recently telling game devs how to port to ARM while Microsoft's GDK still refuses to even run through emulation on ARM. I don't get what the holdup is given how trivial the porting process was for our engine and games. In fact Microsoft has even broken things that used to previously work, for example the Xbox app and Xbox Insider Hub both used to work fine on ARM and let you install and play games. But over the years they've been updated to a point where they're completely unusable, the Xbox app on ARM only does cloud streaming now and the Xbox Insider Hub on ARM doesn't even launch anymore. How are they making things worse over time?? At least we did get Vulkan support on ARM finally, that's the one major thing I was wanting for years.

Microsoft is the sole actor making me consider Linux more and more - and I'm finding less and less reasons as to why I shouldn't switch

The company I work at switched almost completely to Linux server side in the 90s. On the Client side Windows still reigns supreme even if there clearly is a movement to Linux/Mac going on in the client space. I ask the team every year if we shouldn't go all in, but they just laugh. I find this so interesting giving the increasing pain they experience managing the windows platform. Every other month something breaks with the platform cloud integration for licenses (we need to anonymize the users, so we have a "special" solution) and it is always a kerfuffle with information leakage. When are the big companies going to start saying "Enough!"?

Java: "we work on any platform!!!" looks inside x86 assembly code

MS is just stuck with their cloud-first agenda since Nadella took over (similar to how Amazon is running in the wrong direction under AWS Jassy). But they've realized that Win11 hasn't worked to get people into the MS cloud (for various reasons), now they think that "AI" is something that people want and want to use that as leverage (which clearly also won't work). Made obvious by talking about getting CoPilot also on Win10. From their point of view this is just a marketing stunt for CoPilot. Don't think they care about the underneath platform, Qualcomm just had what they wanted from an NPU before Intel and AMD. The engineering resources at that point were available for free basically as clearly they're not doing anything useful anymore (WSA canceled among others). And of course they want to mimic Apples business model and more importantly profit margin for a long time (again, completely the wrong move).

The move to ARM is concerning. Microsoft has been trying to lock down windows hardware for decades. We need to make sure that this hardware is open to other operating systems.

This is why I have been running Linux on my desktop for some five years now. Microsoft has done nothing but make Windows more restricted, more expensive, more buggy, and more monetized

Microsoft: "People hate Windows - what could it be?" Honest Guy: "The ads and bloat?" - thrown out the window meme Pitch guy: "x86 battery life! That's the enemy!"

Installing OS, 10 years ago: Windows: click a couple of buttons, enter username and password. Linux: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github. Installing OS today: Linux: click a couple of buttons, enter username and password. Windows: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github.

Another interesting point is that the modern Linux experience is actually very good if it's already installed. Similarly, the installation is something that people rarely discuss with Windows. I recently did a "from scratch" dual boot, and installing Windows was actually WORSE than installing Linux. It was a pain to make the install media (I eventually borrowed a friend's computer, and it still took two tries), and Windows would't let me continue the installation without the Internet, even though it had no wireless drivers on the laptop. I finally finished installing Windows USB-tethered to my phone, and I'll even ignore how long the updates took and the frustratingly convoluted process of doing basic things like preventing random apps from installing automatically. On Linux despite a bug with the boot splash (already fixed upstream) everything else worked basically perfectly. It took me about 1/3 the time to install Linux and more importantly the user experience now that it's done, is excellent. My computer runs smoothly, updates are very fast, even my games run well. I think soon we'll start to see more computers coming with Linux, and I think the user experience will feel surprisingly good when it's already installed.

There was so much pressure on co-pilot with the re-call "feature" that people forgot that these laptops are being sold. I walked into Staples (because BB did not have the 15 inch) and asked for the 15", which I knew they had two in stock. Sales person was like, are you sure you want to buy this?

Thanks a lot for the comprehensive talk. I started to feel paranoid, because I was reading similar feedback from the advanced users/developers, while all the reviewers are praising and misreading charts. Thanks for the reality check.

Almost all of the big youtube reviewers literally where praising the QC Elite while their own performance slides in the background told a completely different story. Never seen anything quite like this before 😂 The amount of QC marketing money and propaganda for the QC Elite is unreal 😂

Not specifically ARM related, but I'm a regular listener of Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, and it pretty much convinced me to upgrade from Windows 10 to Linux instead of Windows 11. The Start menu loss of functionality, the ads, the ignoring of default browser in favor of Edge, the enabling of One Drive backup without consent, the way fixes for vulnerabilities seem to have been de-prioritized, and more recently the aggressive promotion of Copilot. I just want to retain control over my own PC. I'd love to see how Linux would run on one of these new ARM PC's, I just don't want the stupid copilot key on my keyboard.

I'm watching the ARM hardware with great interest. I used a macbook air m2 for work for a while. As far as the hardware, performance, and battery life go I loved that thing. I'd be far more interested in getting ARM's battery life in a slick, light weight, performant Linux laptop than I am emulating x86 executables and seeing microsoft give me ads even though I paid money for the license.