If the manufacturers had, y’know, provided the information needed for drivers without requiring ginormous amounts of money to be paid in, the support would be there by now. Without it, there’s an inevitable reverse engineering catch-up period.
Plus, the article was evaluating Debian, which tends to be conservative when updating packages. I’d expect support to become available in other distros first. Hmmm . . . Here we go. Someone’s got Gentoo running on one, with a note saying “sound, bluetooth and camera still need work (on 6.12.4 kernel)” (Gentoo ARM hardware list, under “Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (Snapdragon)”). So the situation is not even nearly as bad as the Phoronix article suggests—it boots, but some drivers for the peripherals aren’t quite there yet.
If the manufacturers had, y’know, provided the information needed for drivers without requiring ginormous amounts of money to be paid in, the support would be there by now. Without it, there’s an inevitable reverse engineering catch-up period.
Plus, the article was evaluating Debian, which tends to be conservative when updating packages. I’d expect support to become available in other distros first. Hmmm . . . Here we go. Someone’s got Gentoo running on one, with a note saying “sound, bluetooth and camera still need work (on 6.12.4 kernel)” (Gentoo ARM hardware list, under “Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (Snapdragon)”). So the situation is not even nearly as bad as the Phoronix article suggests—it boots, but some drivers for the peripherals aren’t quite there yet.