I've had a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (32gb) for 3 months now, and my experience with it has been quite good. Mostly been using it for light development, browsing, media, etc.
Installing most software on Windows wasn't a big problem, just make sure it's an arm64 process in the task manager and you're good. I would highly recommend to make a list of all programs you use and make sure they have arm64 support (not just arm, that's 32bit) before you buy a Snapdragon laptop. VLC was the only problem I encountered, it only had a nightly version that was too unstable. I didn't find a lot of alternatives for media players except for Windows media player (yes that still exists).
I was mostly impressed with how well WSL2 ran on it. I have been running it for years and it works just as well for the Snapdragon laptops. Here too, most software I needed had arm64 binaries, especially from apt. I just couldn't use Homebrew as I used to, so it took slightly longer to install things (brew is supported for Linux but only on x86).
It really depends on your needs off course, if you're into the WSL + VS Code ecosystem for things like Python, Go, Rust development, I would highly recommend it. Don't expect to do any heavy development work with LLMs though, but not many machines are even capable of that anyway (x86 or not).
I knew what I was getting into buying this pc and being an early adopter wasn't going to be easy. But I'm surprised with how little issues I encountered in the end and that I can do pretty much everything I used to do before that. And in case I really can't run an app I always have an x86 desktop to fall back on.
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I've had a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (32gb) for 3 months now, and my experience with it has been quite good. Mostly been using it for light development, browsing, media, etc.
Installing most software on Windows wasn't a big problem, just make sure it's an arm64 process in the task manager and you're good. I would highly recommend to make a list of all programs you use and make sure they have arm64 support (not just arm, that's 32bit) before you buy a Snapdragon laptop. VLC was the only problem I encountered, it only had a nightly version that was too unstable. I didn't find a lot of alternatives for media players except for Windows media player (yes that still exists).
I was mostly impressed with how well WSL2 ran on it. I have been running it for years and it works just as well for the Snapdragon laptops. Here too, most software I needed had arm64 binaries, especially from apt. I just couldn't use Homebrew as I used to, so it took slightly longer to install things (brew is supported for Linux but only on x86).
It really depends on your needs off course, if you're into the WSL + VS Code ecosystem for things like Python, Go, Rust development, I would highly recommend it. Don't expect to do any heavy development work with LLMs though, but not many machines are even capable of that anyway (x86 or not).
I knew what I was getting into buying this pc and being an early adopter wasn't going to be easy. But I'm surprised with how little issues I encountered in the end and that I can do pretty much everything I used to do before that. And in case I really can't run an app I always have an x86 desktop to fall back on.
So you're not able to do VLC via emulation?