Arch Linux package maintainer Josephine Pfeiffer has installed Arch Linux on an ASUS ProArt P16 laptop with NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip, hardware that officially ships with Windows 11 on Arm. In a post published Oct. 19 on josie.lol , Pfeiffer reported that the Linux build keeps up with Windows in 7-Zip benchmarks and reports the same 116.0 GiB memory pool to both the operating system and CUDA.

The machine is the ASUS ProArt P16 H7607BA-SE033W, the 128 GB RAM configuration with 6,144 CUDA cores and a 2 TB SSD. Pfeiffer, who is on the Arch staff and has previously put Arch on IBM mainframes, titled the post "putting linux on my rtx spark laptop because i don't have a microsoft account" and listed privacy concessions during Windows setup, the long wait to move the taskbar to the side of the screen and Windows advertising among the reasons for skipping Windows.

How the install works

The build uses Arch Linux ARM, the separate project that ports Arch packages to ARM, with hardware support added on top.…