Putting Linux On My RTX Spark Laptop Because I Don’t Have A Microsoft Account

TL;DR

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Josephine Pfeiffer reports installing Arch Linux ARM on an ASUS ProArt P16 H7607BA-SE033W, a 128 GB laptop with NVIDIA’s N1X chip, despite official support being Windows-only. Her setup reports 116.0 GiB for both system memory and CUDA; her 7-Zip comparisons show roughly similar single-thread results and modestly higher multithread scores than selected Windows tests, with important test differences.

Developer Josephine Pfeiffer says she has booted and installed Arch Linux ARM on an ASUS ProArt P16 H7607BA-SE033W laptop with NVIDIA’s N1X chip, despite the machine’s official support being Windows-only. Her report includes a bootable USB setup, hardware patches and tests suggesting Linux can use a 116.0 GiB shared memory pool for both system RAM and CUDA, a result relevant to people running large AI models locally.

Pfeiffer’s system is the 128 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD configuration, with a 20-core N1X processor and 6,144 CUDA cores. She says the display works at 3840 × 2400 resolution and 120 Hz, alongside networking, audio, keyboard support and NVIDIA container integration. Her published repository contains build scripts and patches; she says the build inputs are hash-pinned and the hardware packages she made are signed with her Arch Linux Package Maintainer key.

Her report says Linux presents 116.0 GiB as both system RAM and CUDA memory, drawn from the same physical pool. She contrasts this with Windows’ division of memory into dedicated GPU, shared and CPU-only regions. In her account, that division can constrain which workloads use particular portions of memory and may require changing the GPU reservation and restarting to alter the allocation.

For a local model test, Pfeiffer ran NVIDIA’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP4-Local checkpoint using vLLM in a native ARM64 container, with B12X CUDA kernels, mixed quantization and an FP8 KV cache. She reports that vLLM used 68.2 GiB for model loading and allocated another 21.1 GiB to the KV cache. Those figures describe her run; the supplied report does not provide generation-speed results in the material available here.

A Larger Pool for Local AI

The central result is not simply that Linux starts on the laptop: Pfeiffer’s setup gives CPU workloads and CUDA access to the same reported memory pool. That could make the machine more flexible for local AI work, where large model weights and supporting data compete for limited memory. Her test allocated nearly 90 GiB to model loading and cache, illustrating the scale of a workload she says the laptop can run.

The report also gives Linux users a practical starting point for hardware that was officially supported only on Windows. But the evidence is one developer’s configuration and tests, not a broad compatibility assessment or a controlled operating-system comparison. The shared-memory result and benchmark figures should be read within those limits.

Building Linux Support on N1X

Pfeiffer says the laptop’s Windows-only official support prompted her to try Linux. She chose Arch Linux ARM, a separate project that ports Arch packages to ARM processors, and adapted existing NVIDIA kernel work for Ubuntu as a starting point. The hardware work included ACPI overrides, framebuffer mapping, a patched ASUS keyboard driver and a dedicated audio machine driver.

She says her installer extends upstream Archinstall 4.5 and places the kernel, NVIDIA driver, power-management and firmware packages on an ignore list, while other packages continue to update from Arch Linux ARM. The report identifies the tested software as kernel 7.0.0-1022-nvidia and NVIDIA driver 615.78.08. Her instructions include extracting the laptop’s ACPI tables and speaker firmware locally; readers would need to follow the source repository rather than assume the setup applies unchanged to other models or firmware versions.

For CPU performance, Pfeiffer ran native ARM64 7-Zip 26.04 with a fixed 32 MiB dictionary, one warmup and three measured passes at each thread count, using the median. She compared her results with published Windows tests. Against an HP OmniBook Ultra 16 result from StorageReview, her Linux setup was about 5% higher in 20-thread compression and 3% in decompression; single-thread results were close. StorageReview did not specify its 7-Zip version or dictionary size, so the numbers are not a controlled comparison.

“My Linux run reports 116.0 GiB as both system RAM and CUDA’s total, from the same physical pool.”

— Josephine Pfeiffer, in her report

Limits of the Reported Tests

The report does not establish whether the Linux setup is ready for general use, nor whether every feature works reliably across other ProArt P16 configurations. The account concerns one H7607BA-SE033W laptop and its H7607BA.300 firmware. The source material also does not include the Qwen run’s output speed, a full set of model-quality results or a direct Windows run of that same workload.

The 7-Zip comparisons use published results from different laptops or configurations, and the cited Windows tests do not disclose all settings, including dictionary size. Pfeiffer’s own test was performed on October 19 with the laptop plugged in and set to its performance profile. Those differences limit conclusions about operating-system performance. The report also does not establish how the setup will fare through future kernel, driver or firmware updates.

Testing Beyond One Laptop

Pfeiffer has published the bootable setup and patches for others to inspect and try. The next useful evidence would be independent installations on the same model, tests across additional workloads, and repeat comparisons using matched hardware, software versions and settings. Until then, the report offers a documented route to running Arch Linux ARM on this configuration, rather than a general guarantee of Linux support for N1X laptops.

Key Questions

Which laptop did Pfeiffer install Linux on?

She used the ASUS ProArt P16 H7607BA-SE033W with 128 GB of RAM, a 2 TB SSD and NVIDIA’s N1X chip.

Which Linux distribution does the setup use?

It uses Arch Linux ARM, with hardware support and installation changes added for the laptop.

What does the 116.0 GiB memory figure mean?

Pfeiffer reports that Linux presents 116.0 GiB to the operating system and CUDA from the laptop’s shared physical memory pool. It is her result on this configuration, not a universal figure for every N1X system.

Does the report prove Linux is faster than Windows?

No. The cited 7-Zip comparisons use different machines or test configurations. Pfeiffer found near-tied single-thread results and modestly higher multithread scores against one published Windows result, but the tests were not fully matched.

Can the Linux setup run a large AI model?

Pfeiffer reports running NVIDIA’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP4-Local checkpoint with vLLM. She says model loading used 68.2 GiB and the KV cache another 21.1 GiB; the supplied material does not state generation speed.

Source: hn