Why would I buy a Mac Mini for Linux when devices like this exist? The Qualcomm chip is officially supported and much cheaper than buying the Mac. Seems to be much less hassle and better value on the Microsoft side of things.
The main reason so many Android devices are throwaway junk is Qualcomm. Don't rely on them for anything that you still want to keep running for more than a couple of years.
We used a Qualcomm module for wifi/bluetooth connectivity on an IoT device and the bluetooth just straight up didn't work for a handful of Android devices. We had to wait like a year for a mitigation, since it was closed source firmware. That was after like a 3 month process of actually find someone who would hear our issue.
Sure, doesn't mean that everything works though. The Thinkpad x13s has the same CPU and apparently is quite tricky to get booted. Once booted audio, sleep, bluetooth and the like has been problematic. Granted that's more of an issue with a laptop than a SFF like the DevKit.
Things do seem to be improving. Releasing the Thinkpad x13s has brought attention to the 8cx gen 3 from the Linux community.
Specs seem to list UEFI Secure Boot, which has been unlockable on all of Microsoft's Surface devices and previous ARM outings. Shipping this with a locked bootloader would be one hell of a breach from tradition (and probably undermine it's usefulness as a dev box anyways).
Regardless, the internal SOC is the same as the new ARM Thinkpad which also shipped with an unlocked bootloader. Pretty much everything suggests that this will ship unlocked.
$699 for a Mini, $599 for this. The 32GB ram may be nice, but I haven't felt ram pressure on my M1 16GB even running Windows VM on Parallels once, with VSCode, Teams, ~20 tabs of Firefox, DBeaver, Outlook, and Kitty open at once.
Would like to see perf numbers. Could be an interesting box, maybe a nice home server.
What more *nix do you want on macOS than is already there?
I can understand from the lockdown perspective (i.e. just give me a Vulkan driver on macOS) but as a polished DTE with a unix terminal I find it pretty decent.
That being said BetterTouchTools and Keyboard Maestro are far above what you can possibly find in any linux software.
MacOS desktop by itself is pretty limited, but once you had these two softwares, the desktop experience become pretty nice, far above anything you find in any completed linux desktop.
But it is it. It's only a 'desktop experience'... Coupled with deep integration with ipad and iphone.
If you want more of a *nix integration, Brew is pretty nice and do more of less the job. As for container, dockers work seamlessly on the command line and integrate well with the file system, even if containers still run atop of a virtual machine.
