My hardware

ZenBook A16 — Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme

Your laptop runs Windows 11 on ARM with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip. That’s a Copilot+ class machine: powerful, efficient, and 100% ARM-native at the CPU layer.

Most software now has native ARM builds. Some doesn’t. Here’s what mattered during setup:

Tool	Status	Notes
Node.js	✅ ARM64	Installed via nodejs.org official .msi. node -p "process.arch" should say arm64
Git	✅ ARM64	Git for Windows ships ARM64
gh CLI	✅ ARM64	Latest releases include ARM64
Syncthing	✅ ARM64	Native build from winget Syncthing.Syncthing (we explicitly grabbed ARM64)
Syncthing Tray	✅ ARM64	Native via winget Martchus.syncthingtray
uv (Python)	✅ ARM64	uv from astral.sh ships ARM64
Gemini CLI	✅ Cross-platform JS	Runs on Node, arch-agnostic
Obsidian	⚠️ Mostly x64	Runs under emulation. Fine for normal use; some plugins with native deps may quirk
SyncTrayzor	❌ x64 only	.NET WPF — we picked Syncthing Tray instead

Caution

Battery vs emulation. Tools running under x64 emulation cost more battery than native ARM ones. For background daemons (sync, MCPs), always prefer native ARM. For occasional GUI apps (Obsidian itself), emulation is fine.

Galaxy S26+ — Android One UI

Your phone is a Samsung Galaxy S26+ on Android with One UI. Samsung’s flavor adds aggressive battery optimization that suspends background apps. For long-running services (Syncthing, Tailscale), you must explicitly exempt them.

For each background app, do all three:

1. Settings → Apps → [App] → Battery → “Unrestricted”
2. Settings → Battery → Background usage limits → Never sleeping apps → + (add the app)
3. Settings → Battery → Background usage limits → Sleeping apps — make sure the app is NOT here

We did this for Syncthing-Fork during setup. Do it for any other background-running app you add.

Why ARM matters

The Snapdragon X2 series benefits:

• ~24+ hour battery (vs ~10 for an x86 equivalent)
• Cool/quiet operation
• Wake-from-sleep is instant
• Strong AI/ML perf for on-device models (you can run small LMs locally for things like Smart Connections embeddings)

The trade-off:

• ~5% of Windows software has compatibility issues (mostly older niche apps)
• Some games / GPU-intensive workloads underperform vs an x86 + dedicated GPU laptop
• Driver maturity is still improving

For a knowledge-work + Claude Code + Obsidian stack: ARM is an excellent choice. We confirmed it.

What broke and what we fixed

During setup we hit two ARM-specific issues:

1. SyncTrayzor wouldn’t have run natively. Solution: switched to Syncthing Tray (native ARM Qt app). Same job, no emulation tax.
2. gemini-cli extension list bug — shows empty in non-tty mode on Windows. Solution: read the enablement file directly at ~/.gemini/extensions/extension-enablement.json to verify state.

Both documented in Troubleshooting.