The best Linux ARM laptop is a 3+ year old MacBook?!
The M2 variant, to be specific.
That is not because I have some deep emotional attachment to the M2 generation of Apple hardware. It is mostly because, if you want a Linux ARM laptop that is actually usable day to day, the options are still surprisingly thin.
The Pinebook Pro is cool, but the performance is not really there for what I want to do. Lenovo has some genuinely interesting ARM laptops, but availability is patchy and pricing can get weird fast.
And that is kind of it.
Until, somehow, Tim Apple enters the chat.
In my area, a 16GB M2 MacBook Air was cheaper than the Lenovo options I could actually find, while also having better hardware in most of the ways I cared about. So I pulled the trigger.
I did try macOS when I first got it. That experiment lasted about 48 hours before I gave up and installed Asahi Alarm, the Arch-based Asahi Linux setup.
Since then, it has been excellent, with one major exception: battery life. The hardware is great, Linux support is better than ever, but the power management still is not where it needs to be.
Even with that caveat, I still think this might be the best Linux ARM laptop you can realistically buy right now. Not because it is perfect, but because the competition is either underpowered, hard to get, or both.