All he had to do was build some packages from source, right? It's really worth learning how to do this, since it removes a lot of constraints.
And the kernel patch should land in the kernel pretty soon, I hope? He won't have to run a patched kernel forever. Should be possible to get that in a release in a year or so?
This is why things like the Apple M Series feels so fast, because while they don't win the multi core performance especially when going up against a 80 core beast like this, they have single thread performance exactly were it is needed.
Maybe we will need 80 cores in future, that is cool but for daily home use it is still just way too much for what we need.
If you want to run Linux on one of the modern Qualcomm Windows laptops, you still generally end up needing to use device tree.
So could you fix that with a new scheduler? Or you just need another SoC with better single core performance? I could imagine that the latter already exists, just not in soc with >16 cores. My naive view is that such high core count system comes with tradoff on core size and interconnect/memeory bus complexity.
And I mean.. my phone is a middle lower end device and for sure I can play youtube videos (maybe in a popup as well) and run the browser without noticing that much difference from my laptop.
It is called Apple Silicon.
I believe Ubuntu also has semi official X1 elite support, no idea if they're working on the latest generation.
Even. Setting it up is a pain: https://github.com/Jeremiah-Hawley/Linux-on-Snapdragon
It can run Windows well though.
I can't even say there was any pain whatsoever. The experience is now more akin to MacOS circa 10.6.x years.