YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account

148 points pfeifferj 2 hours ago 64 comments

bitmasher9 2 hours ago | parent

Is a Microsoft account required to use Windows on these RTX spark laptops?

Am I being too stubborn for not wanting a cloud account tied to my desktop operating system?

tomwheeler 2 hours ago | parent

No, the vendor is being too presumptuous. This is clearly a case of them putting their needs above yours.

colechristensen 2 hours ago | parent

It is getting progressively more difficult to set up a new Windows laptop without a cloud account. Currently it's a pretty esotaric command line prompt if you know the keybinding to get a terminal open.

mahboi 2 hours ago | parent

For Win10, I had to keep it disconnected from the network throughout the install process. Once you're connected, you have to do it all over again.

downrightmike 1 hour ago | parent

Win7 was the GOAT

hypfer 2 hours ago | parent

Hm, what's the learning here?

What challenge has been overcome?

I can see that hardware was bought, and that's cool hardware and all, but consumption is rather uninspiring.

I suppose it's the arm64 part? Or the review of some new hardware other people might be interested in?

petercooper 2 hours ago | parent

As someone who was intrigued by these new machines but also has no interest in running Windows, I'm quite happy to learn it works. Though admittedly I was expecting to see DGX OS first.

cute_boi 1 hour ago | parent

i would do same if i have to use windows. I will literally pay anything to not use windows, thanks to microslop.

swiftcoder 1 hour ago | parent

She literally posted a link to the patches she wrote to get it to boot linux. That seems like it's not nothing

hypfer 1 hour ago | parent

But does it go into detail about those changes?

Because that sounds interesting! But I didn't see anything like that when I've (admittedly) skimmed through the review.

SimianSci 2 hours ago | parent

getting a local account is simple.

Windows Pro > Work or School Account > Join a Domain instead > Set password & recovery questions

The one component here that is not present on most machines straight from the manufacturer is the presence of the Pro version. The home version of windows requires the account with increasingly limited alternatives.

Telaneo 1 hour ago | parent

Simple™. Easy™.

delecti 1 hour ago | parent

As the author mentions in TFA, she's on the Arch staff as a package maintainer. I don't think there was a technical obstacle around the windows setup process.

https://archlinux.org/people/package-maintainers/#josie

chem83 2 hours ago | parent

Not sure there's a strong use case for one of these $6K laptops yet, considering you can get a mini PC running AMD Ryzen 495 or 395 with 96, 128 and 192 GB of memory for similar amount of money and connect remotely from a cheaper/smaller/more battery-efficient laptop. Microsoft also has this same chip in non-laptop form factor: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-rtx-....

Coding while flying is often the use case people bring up, but the power brick these laptops come with sometimes trip the plane's power plug in coach and you can't run local AI on battery for long. Also, over time planes will get better connectivity (Starlink etc.) and that particular full-offline scenario will go away.

For gaming, there are better options with dedicated GPUs like the Asus Zephyrus and similar.

What am I missing?

SimianSci 2 hours ago | parent

The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users, and as an architecture, it is very well supported across the Windows ecosystem. The RTX Spark is ARM64, which means more efficient power management at the cost of a small hit to sustained performance loads. But comes at the cost of being less supported when it comes to available software packages.

Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

> The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users [...]

A Ryzen AI Max+ 395 powered tablet with 70Wh [0] gets the same battery life given the same task as a Nvidia N1X powered laptop with 99.9 Wh [1].

Power Consumption in their "Cyberpunk / Stress Test" is also lower at Ø109.3 (108.8-110.8) Watt for the x86_64 vs Ø134.5 (132.1-137.5) Watt for the arm64 system using the same settings, resolution and display brightness. They also get the same performance when normalising for resolutions and settings in Cyberpunk, so this is not an instance of one providing significantly more performance.

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ROG-Flow-Z13-GZ302EA-Conv...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ProArt-P16-RTX-Spark-Lapt...

MrFlynn 1 hour ago | parent

To add, battery life on this chip hasn’t been that impressive [1]. It’s basically matching recent MacBook Pros, while sporting a significantly larger battery. Both AMD and Intel have made significant strides in improving power consumption on their latest core designs, to the point where there isn’t a lot of difference anymore.

[1] https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/10/16/nvidia-rtx-spark...

foxes 1 hour ago | parent

A mini pc doesnt have a battery. Your point doesnt seem very coherent.

5vg 2 hours ago | parent

i don’t think they’re flying coach after spending 6k on a laptop…

Kirby64 1 hour ago | parent

Why? Flying business everywhere is substantially more expensive than a one time cost of $6k for a laptop. A single business ticket anywhere overseas matches or exceeds that in most cases.

cortesoft 1 hour ago | parent

What? I have spent $10k on a computer but would never fly business or first class, that shit is way too expensive. Two trips would buy a new $10k computer!

giancarlostoro 1 hour ago | parent

The Nvidia based one uses the memory for the GPU allowing you to run AI models on the GPU, the system you're talking about has no such setup. These are Nvidia powered laptops that do what Apple does with their laptops where the system and GPU VRAM are shared as needed, except the idea here is that Nvidia designed these to perform very well for local inference, at least, that's how I understand it.

girvo 1 hour ago | parent

No, the AMD ones he’s talking about allow the GPU to address that memory as well: they’re “APU’s” that share system RAM as GPU memory

That said the compute power of the GB10 is awesome, my DGX Spark-like has been better than I expected.

giancarlostoro 1 hour ago | parent

That's the thing, my understanding is that these Nvidia ones are supposed to have very impressive performance.

Melatonic 2 minutes ago | parent

They're severely hampered by memory bandwidth

fy20 1 hour ago | parent

Depending on what you are doing you may find all the models are written for CUDA though. I'm playing with gaussian splatting and it's like that. Codex is doing a good job porting stuff to Metal, but it would be easier & faster if I had Nvidia hardware to just run the models natively.

Not everything with AI is LLMs running on llama.cpp.

MrFlynn 1 hour ago | parent

The core design is also approaching 3 years old at this point, so it’s not really even that competitive with the latest stuff out of the other chip makers. It’s fine, but nothing to write home about. Certainly not worth the crazy premium Nvidia is charging for it.

benoau 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah but this is all there is until what 2028? 2029? And those could cost 2x-3x too.

Vaslo 1 hour ago | parent

May always be behind with how fast things change, you think?

rwz 1 hour ago | parent

I feel like even if a next generation of chips dropped tomorrow, it'd be a while until they can scale up production and actually start selling products you or I could realistically purchase and by that time this new generation chip would already by a couple of years old with something much better and powerful in the final stages of design.

cmrdporcupine 52 minutes ago | parent

If it's anything like my DGX Spark, the "premium" is almost 100% just the memory cost, not the GPU or ARM core.

10 months ago when I got my Spark it was competitive in price with a similarly spec'd out Mac Studio. As RAM prices have gone even more parabolic, so has its price. And so has the Mac's. And the Strix Halo competitors.

Grombobulous 47 minutes ago | parent

I don’t even really think it’s “fine.” It’s hard to even understand who they are for. Just Josh Tech on YouTube did a great review of these laptops as they’re hitting the market.

Good battery life is probably the biggest upside, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Zephyrus G16 is just about as good (more on that alternative later).

The downsides are numerous:

- Middling GPU performance compared to discrete RTX mobile GPUs. You’re barely trading blows with an 5070Ti with the top end Spark chip. And yes, Nvidia markets RTX Spark for gaming, so we need to judge them in that context, too. Windows on ARM isn’t amazing for gaming for various reasons including lack of anti-cheat compatibility.

- Compatibility and/or performance issues on Windows ARM. You’re running a lot of stuff non-native

- As you mentioned, the CPU cores are nothing to write home about with very mid single core performance.

- Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome

- Poor/no Linux support, in a world where when Linux and Mac get the most attention for AI workflows.

I think there may be a case for being a good performance value for AI training, but for local inference I’m not seeing how that makes sense. Heck, for local inference I think it’s better to run a workstation as a server and then use the laptop as a client. You benefit from a better hardware value as well as putting less of the strain on the laptop, saving battery life. The fact that it’s plugged in means you can run long-running jobs and scheduled tasks, which is often the strength of local AI. The cost of one of these RTX Spark laptops will get you a dual R9700 inference workstation if you’re smart about the build.

You’ve also got projects like Strata that are going to define trends for how people run local AI. Why bother with $6000 integrated graphics machines or trying to squeeze quality models into one or two expensive 24-32GB GPUs when you can get 60 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a 16GB RX 9060XT ($500) with 64GB of DDR4 RAM?

Want to do local inference on a laptop? Grab a Zephyrus G16, get the 64GB/RTX 5080 spec, run Strata, then as a bonus you can run AAA games at full blast. This costs less than $5000.

Waiting ~1 year for the M7 Pro chip on MacBook Pro models is another option that is almost certainly a better idea if the rumors about that chip are true.

I’m struggling to find a way to find a worse value buying something, anything that isn’t an RTX Spark. For that money there are just so many alternatives.

radium3d 1 hour ago | parent

The strong case is pretty much only if you can't wait another 3-4 years for ram prices to come back down.

Memory makers are responding with a huge build-out. Building a fab shell and cleanroom takes years, which is why the crunch has lasted so long, but many of these projects are now well underway. New capacity is what ended past memory shortages. New factories going in:

SK hynix

M15X, Cheongju, Korea: first wafers early 2026 (reported), ramping through 2027 Yongin Y1, Korea: first cleanroom Feb 2027 (company target) Yongin Y2, Korea: groundbreaking planned July 2027, first cleanroom June 2029 Micron

ID1, Boise: first wafer output mid-2027 Tongluo, Taiwan: an existing PSMC cleanroom it bought for $1.8B, with meaningful shipments mid-2027 ID2, Boise: late 2028 Hiroshima, Japan: broke ground July 2026, with initial output late 2028 Clay, New York (up to 4 fabs, $100B): broke ground Jan 2026, with first output in 2030 Samsung

P5, Pyeongtaek: mass production 2028 (reported) Yongin national complex: site work began Oct 2026, with the first fab targeting Oct 2029 (reported; Samsung hasn't given a date) Nanya

Fab 5A, New Taipei: 10nm-class EUV DRAM, with wafer starts in 2H 2027 (reported) Tesla / SpaceX (Terafab)

Research fab at Giga Texas, Austin: broke ground April 2026. There's no official output date. Grimes County, Texas (logic, memory, packaging; Phase 1 over $16.8B): land clearing since Aug 2026. Texas filings say commercial operations in 2028, but SemiAnalysis estimates late 2029.

The first real supply relief is 2027, a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.

Sources: Micron FQ4 2026 call, the SK hynix newsroom, TrendForce, Texas JETI filings via ENR, and Tom's Hardware/SemiAnalysis.

to11mtm 1 hour ago | parent

> which is why the crunch has lasted so long,

It's been like a year-ish...

And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,

> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.

'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.

Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.

[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.

[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...

josephg 38 minutes ago | parent

> Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload

Honestly I think most of us are just spoiled kids crying when our expensive toys are being taken away. If memory cost 10x more to manufacture than it does now, we’d just have 10x less ram in our computers and our software would be written to deal with that. We’ve done it before. My first computer had 4mb of ram and it ran windows 3.1 just fine. We still had working compilers. If ram were 10x cheaper before the supply shock, I think we’d be crying that companies won’t buy us 320gb ram in our laptops. The java and rust compilers would somehow be even less ram efficient. Firefox and chrome would still happily use it all to run adware across the same 50 tabs I want to keep open.

Theres good reason for LLMs to need that much ram. But very little else we do on our computers needs anywhere near as much ram as we use. Have faster computers made video games more fun in the last two decades? I don’t think so.

The supply crisis is annoying. But I’m also a little glad there’s a reason to push back on fat, lazy software.

shric 1 minute ago | parent

I noticed yesterday that the original Ultima 7 required 2 MB of RAM and a 386 or 386SX [1]

You can buy a version from gog that runs on Windows 10 requiring 2 GB of RAM and an unspecified 1.8GHz CPU [2]

[1] https://www.mocagh.org/origin/u7completeaus-manual.pdf

[2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_7_complete

lifeisloving 49 minutes ago | parent

You could just code on a flight.. No need for llm. Id your brain is incapable of writing code without internet/llms you could write your specs/prompts for when you land.

barrkel 46 minutes ago | parent

You're not missing anything. Most devices these days are extremely limited without internet access.

Tailscale is the key ingredient.

smcleod 21 minutes ago | parent

Both the AMD Ryzen 395/495 and the Spark have terribly slow bandwidth, their performance is slower than a M2 max, akin to just an M4 Pro or RTX 4060.

internet2000 2 hours ago | parent

Hey just as a heads-up Microsoft accounts are free to make https://signup.live.com/

herbst 2 hours ago | parent

But who would want that?

cabaalis 2 hours ago | parent

I don't want a cloud login telemetry of when I am using my computer, an account that can be disabled by a provider, and constant ads to backup to onedrive. I also moved to linux because of this. (was already a linux guy, but Windows is completely in my rear-view now.)

monksy 1 hour ago | parent

That is not acceptable in order to use a device you bought.

Also that means you're forced into a manditory arbitration clase and a class action waver.

Dylan16807 1 hour ago | parent

The stuff you have to agree to is a very significant cost. You're not just associating a username with a password.

Telaneo 1 hour ago | parent

I can get dogshit for free too. Doesn't mean I want it.

kahnclusions 1 hour ago | parent

Microsoft turns on OneDrive backups by default without your knowledge or consent, sending your private files to MS servers, not only during setup but it can also happen during updates. Even when you try keep it disabled, they constantly pressure you into enabling it every time you login, and make it really easy to accidentally turn it on. Once your files are in OneDrive, MS can access them. Don't be surprised if it later turns out they're training their LLMs on people's private files.

jamiek88 48 minutes ago | parent

I haven’t experienced any of this on my win 11 sim racing rig. I wonder why? I was thinking then i remembered - I ran a script I found that removed copilot, and a lot of other shit. Can’t remember the name it was on GitHub. I only use that computer to run iracing and LMU and it’s been updating fine.

Shouldn’t have to do that of course, but it can be done.

downrightmike 1 hour ago | parent

-~`I do not want one ever`~-

starfallg 1 hour ago | parent

Does anybody know how Wayland performs on these?

jasoneckert 1 hour ago | parent

I have a DGX Spark (Ubuntu), and when Microsoft and NVIDIA announced the RTX Spark running Windows, I thought to myself: Why would I get that instead of the DGX Spark?

The OS makes a big difference for most developers, and the DGX Spark stack and experience is mature.

manyatoms 1 hour ago | parent

I thought so too, but there's a ton of people out there wading their way through trying to re-purpose their gaming rigs to run qwen3.8-flash-next on their gaming rig (at Q2..) via WSL

wmf 31 minutes ago | parent

RTX Spark is $1,000 cheaper because it doesn't have the NIC and it also comes in a laptop if that's what you prefer.

TIPSIO 1 hour ago | parent

Being forced to login to use your own hardware is one issue for sure…

but separately everything about Microsoft’s login experience is pure pain.

Multiple broken redirects, broken links, buttons that loop, and more just to hit a CAPTCHA AI can solve anyway.

The only thing worse is for the poor soul developers who have had to login to their dev portal to setup SSO Microsoft for an app. It’s the worst I have ever seen in my life (even using Supabase that hand holds you through it).

dark-star 1 hour ago | parent

simply creating a Microsoft account would have been far quicker and easier ;-)

Grimblewald 59 minutes ago | parent

not really, it would simply be the first of many headaches that just get worse as time goes on. Windows is a festering blight, it costs you more and more in bullshit you deal with the longer you have it.

For example, I cannot currentl use the ms suite, like word or excel, because it asks me to log into an institutional account that I dont have, despite my account being the owner of the licenses for the suite running on my laptop. Make that make sense. All because i opened an institutional word document on it, i've tried fully reinstalling, no dice. i've tried nuking caches and registry entries, no dice. Window's basic functionality is indistinguishable from maleware.

74948494i4 1 hour ago | parent

I got the HP version of this 128GB for 3.8k. I have yet to see a better deal for that ram.

(Expired but there was coupon https://slickdeals.net/f/20164014-hp-omnibook-x-14-nvidia-rt...)

rwz 1 hour ago | parent

How? I can see the 64GB version on HP website costs $5k right now: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-omnibook-ultra-laptop-n...

schaefer 50 minutes ago | parent

I agree with your skepticism.

3.8k is less than the preorder cost of the DGX Spark over a year ago (Oct 14th, 2025).

m463 14 minutes ago | parent

Did it actually come in the mail?

I've bought some low-priced things on amazon, just to have them cancelled. Spooky since I figure someone got my name, address, phone number from amazon.

pshc 1 hour ago | parent

Only 30 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next? These days thanks to those specialized engines out there I can get ~2x that speed on a 24 GB video card with RAM offload. Thermal limits, I assume...

I wonder how its performance is on dense models.

Grimblewald 1 hour ago | parent

memeory bandwidth is typically the limiting factor, not compute. Your card quite likely has 2x or more the bandwidth.

wmedrano 48 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, its pretty low. I get about 60tps with a specialized engine on Strix Halo that runs UD-IQ4_XS with MTP

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

> When rumours started circulating about a laptop with over 100 GiB of RAM the GPU could access

That was like three years ago with the release of M3, do you not count MacBooks as laptops or something? Not that you could run Linux on it back then, but you don't even mention the existence of Apple silicon at all?