I hope Qualcomm upstreams all the device tree kernel level stuff to Linux for every laptop model. One of the things I don't like about Arm Laptops is—for example—how even if a SoC is supported upstream, if the manufacturer does not upload a device tree for their device, then you're cooked.
I read that while these Snapdragon laptops do technically have UEFI + ACPI, the information they provide is not useful for Linux and is more coupled with Qualcomm's proprietary drivers on Windows. Therefore, device trees are needed on Linux (I could be wrong about the first part).
I believe the Orin AGX is in a similar position. It does a UEFI boot but you absolutely have to supply a correct dtb and if you don't then key peripherals like USB and ethernet can just completely not work, or in one case I experienced, subtly malfunction in a way that appears to be fine but throws off a bunch of extra radiation that fails a certification test.
This is exactly what they have already been doing for the past two months, directly from their devs, posted to Linux ARM MSM mailing list, and despite not having all of the specs from manufacturers. See the EC driver submission for Asus ZenBook A16 from this past week.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like creating device tree should be relatively straightforward if driver support is there. So while having official device tree is awesome, it's not something that's very hard to do. Now writing drivers without datasheets, using reverse-engineering is something that's hard to do.
This is one of those situations, even if they don't want to release specific code, they could at least release the specifications so that others could build the software stack for this.
I don't think that ARM Laptops have a chance in Linux land as long as each model requires stuff like a custom DT.
I'm typing this on a Thinkpad x13s Gen1, "21BX000XGE".
I really really like the device, best laptop I've owned so far, speaking strictly from a hardware perspective.
No vents mean I can use it on a pillow, and it's dead silent. It never runs hot, great battery life. Thin and light, yet has all the performance I need.
But would I recommend the laptop to any fellow Linux user? Absolutely not.
Even though it was released in 2022, the webcam still won't work.
I can't limit the battery charge to 80% like on my x86 Thinkpad.
There was a time when the graphics driver and Chromium didn't like each other and I had to wrangle Chromium into software rendering mode to avoid heavy artifacts on the screen (export force_gl_vendor="notfreedreno").
In fact, I still have the workaround in place. Not sure if it's still needed though. A fix was merged upstream last year, need to check whether it made it into Fedora yet.
I got the machine in 2025, and here are the workarounds and config changes I had to make just to get Fedora running last year, 3 years after release:
- extra kernel arguments ("arm64.nopauth" seems to be needed still in 2026, "clk_ignore_unused pd_ignore_unused" I have been able to remove at some point)
- initramfs modification, /etc/dracut.conf.d/x13s_firmware.conf: install_items+=" /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcdxkmsuc8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcadsp8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qccdsp8280.mbn.xz ". Not sure if these are still needed, they were at some point.
In late 2025, installing Fedora was still a pain in the butt.
There were custom-built ISOs for my device, but they didn't work because my firmware was too new. Stupid me ran a firmware update on the preinstalled windows.
I tried building my own ISO, but the firmware never recognized those as a boot device for some reason (I have successfully built custom ISOs for x86 many times).
In the end, I was able to use QEMU + chroot on my x86 machine to install Fedora ARM onto an external HDD, make the needed modifications in there, boot that on the laptop and run the anaconda installer, then make modifications to the install on the internal storage.
I just ran a quick `wc -w` on my installation and debug notes for the machine, and it's a cool 11180 words.
At some point, it turned out that the display my unit uses was not in the list of known displays for the x13s. Seems that was mostly inconsequential aside from a kernel warning and maybe slower wakeup. Helped upstream with that, which eventually resulted in this commit: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/3330b71caff6cdc387f...
I'm no stranger to exotic architectures and machines, having used Gentoo on a ppc64le machine as a daily driver for 3+ years. And I do like the laptop. But w/o fundamental improvements to the way ARM bringup works, not just improvements for individual machines, I wouldn't recommend this stuff to any unsuspecting user.
I've been working on embedded systems using iMX8s, and it's equally awful. You have to maintain your own fork of UBoot. You have to spend hours tweaking device trees. The "NXP" kernel is out of date and never updated, the mainline kernel is missing loads of drivers.
Meanwhile in x86 land you can just download a distro and boot it. Secure boot works out of the box. It's night and day.
Linaro is (or was, back when I was involved ~10 years ago) non-profit sponsored by SoC vendors to develop, maintain and upstream SoC support for Linux, along with running a comprehensive validation lab for all the boards they support.
A list of manufacturers did change a few times, and it was half-sponsored by ARM directly.
I think a lot of people don't realize the level of performance Qualcomm has reached with these. This is the closest competition to Apple's M series that we have, for the laptop form factor at least. They are better than Intel and AMD's best. I'd love to buy an X2 laptop with Linux preinstalled and supported.
This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
I’m glad we’re finally getting more competitors to Intel/AMD.
Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.
If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.
It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.
> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).
If Apple cared about quality, they wouldn't have gotten rid of Qualcomm modems, and forced people to use the inferior Intel modems. I always avoided by iPhone models with Intel modems starting around the 6S era.
A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.
Let me appropriate and rephrase a sentence from earlier in the thread: "performance per watt doesn't matter at all if the combination of the machine's feature set, both in hardware and software, as well as form factor, is essentially useless to you".
I have seen this far too many times on HN. A design that put Performance Per Watt first is how you extract more multicore performance when you are fundamentally limited by cooling.
ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.
There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.
But that's not answering my question? What do you expect to get from today's ARM chips that's fundamentally impossible otherwise? And how is that a step forward?
In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.
The comment you're replying to is implying that in an ARM world nothing is standard, portable, or compatible by default. Think about smartphones: Every single one a bespoke board with bespoke hardware.
In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.
Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?
We get to blame OpenAI et al for this one again. AMD is using their current allocation of TSMC 3nm production to make Epyc rather than Ryzen so Ryzen is jumping from 4nm to 2nm. But 2nm Ryzen is still a few months out, and the 4nm current ones are naturally at a disadvantage when Qualcomm is using 3nm.
On paper, the M series is faster. It's not the same situation as when AMD and Intel were suprised by Apple, though. All of the tricks that made people go for the M1 Macs and think amd64 is dead are now also available on amd64.
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
With the help of vibe coding it might take a lot shorter time to get m series working on Linux. Though the quality of code is not guaranteed to be perfect.
I have a beefy AMD system and recently bought a macbook pro M5 pro. I'm still blown away by how much faster the M5 is than my AMD tower, while producing no heat or noise.
From what I can tell, you can get more total performance from intel/amd, but at the cost of more power draw, which besides needing more cooling also means shorter battery life.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
M series just always perform better than you expect. I don’t know how to explain it tbh. We use them for live streaming at work and they’re just never pushed to their limits (24gb mac minis) even as we run 7 or 8 independent HD sources + iso recordings of each one. They don’t break a sweat.
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
A lot of people do see the graphs. But reality is - unless they cooperate with lkml and merge it there is no point. Ubuntu has the only beta ISO for it - works not very good for the Lenovo. Qualcomm does not provide any support. Then people won't buy.
The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. I also have the Snapdragon T14s which gets about 14 hours, but I'm still waiting to get full Linux support for this two year old laptop.
Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows
nothing wrong with it! looks fine! just: there should be other products with the nice core. i could really use a 10-14" tablet. i mean, after all, ROG Flow 13 with a Strix Halo was not even that late after launch! dense is doable!
20% slower than the M5 is still a great result. I'm still using an M1 macbook pro, and it's more than fast enough for editing film, browsing the internet and writing code.
Check this chart. Single core performance is where Apple has dominated the most. Qualcomm is above every non-Apple competitor including desktop chips, and only 5% behind the fastest M5 MacBook Air (this chip is going into Air-class laptops). Yes, M6 is coming, but X2 has been available for months already.
"Desktop chip" hasn't been a meaningful variable for single-thread performance in more than a decade. A single core can't use more than a given amount of power or it would melt and laptops have that much in their power budget.
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has twice the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
Yes, where desktops differ is not so much the chips but rather the cooling capability. You have the space to have proper air flow and water cooling etc. So that do give quite a bit of performance.
For Geekbench in particular, expect to gain a few percent in Linux vs. Windows. Of course, you should always look at your workload. The thing that causes me to wait for my computer the most is build times, where the multi-core benchmarks are more interesting than single core benchmarks, and these look like they could make for interesting low power dev boxes when/if proper Linux support lands.
OpenBSD developer Tobias Heider (tobhe@) has already committed the first pieces of OpenBSD/arm64 support for these Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops.
"This gets USB, keyboard and touchpad working in ACPI mode on the HP Elitebook X G2q."
Give me something that is 80% as efficient, 80% as good hw as the apple m-series but runs Debian (or Ubuntu) and I am happy to pay apple+ prices for pure linux experience. I say this as someone who just bought a new m5 machine. I have seen framework/sys76 but never pulled trigger.
I don't really care about raw performance, just want long battery life, decent screen, and a *nix environment to work in. 99% of workload is going to be on a remote machine anyways.
This already exists. I got a Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 last year from Lenovo, and it shipped with Ubuntu, which made the price around $50 cheaper if I recall. I replaced it with Debian, of course, but the battery life is fine and it is a quiet machine.
I also purchased the T14s Snapdragon two years ago, and it gets longer battery life (if you just use a terminal only, the battery life remaining will sometimes say 20 hours, but it's more like 14-15 realistically). However, it can get uncomfortably hot on the left edge at the speaker. The T14s 2-in-1 (Intel) does not have any hot spots, though.
Look into something with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3. Performance is worse than the Apple M chips but you shouldn't have a problem running Linux and the battery life is good. I have a laptop with the previous generation of Intel chip (Core Ultra 258). The battery life is great, the computer never gets hot, and the fan rarely turns on (only if I'm doing like a long C++ compile or something, never for stuff like web browsing or watching videos).
I have an HP AMD laptop with a Ryzen and have nothing to complain about, other than the loud cooling solution. It's a fast non-nonsense system. Also a no-frills physical design. Ubuntu works fully without any additional steps needed from me. I'm not sure what you're hoping the market will provide, apart from quieter cooling.
Historically speaking, between average Android device and average Chromebook, latter is far easier to get mainline kernel + "normal" Linux distro running, e.g: 8 Chromebooks vs. only 1 Android device (and even that is a dev. board) in official Arch supported hardware list:
ALARM isn't official Arch, so this also isn't an "official Arch supported hardware list". Arch is currently still only x86_64 and everything else is at best unofficial if not just straight up unaffiliated.
(do note that this might change soon-ish™ considering [0], but I think they want to first get their automated build infrastructure ready)
So Arch on ARM is basically limited to an SoC with at most 8GB of RAM? It looks like we are still very far from a mainstream ARM motherboard with a socketed CPU, upgradable RAM and support for discrete GPUs. Until then, I see no reason to move away from x86.
> this work is focused on laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series. It does not currently cover desktop form factors, earlier Snapdragon X platforms, or other development boards. Readiness also varies by OEM design and Snapdragon X2 Series variant.
So same ARM BS as usual - AMD and Intel x64 are still the kings when it comes to out the door Linux support.
I'll buy a ARM PC when I can swap its motherboard CPU and GPU to a newer gen and my existing Linux install boots up without having to flash a new bootloader and custom vendor kernel with proprietary GPU blob.
"I'll buy a ARM PC when I can swap its motherboard CPU and GPU to a newer gen and my existing Linux install boots up without having to flash a new bootloader and custom vendor kernel with proprietary GPU blob."
add in swappable batteries like older laptops and phones, and I would as well. not now though.
I think this is huge. I thought about getting one of these chips a long time ago, but linux support was just a breaker. I ended up sticking to my current laptop and getting a macbook some years after
The "original" X Elite was also supposed to get good linux support but it unfortunately never happened.
Every single one of the "X" series had this identical announcement.
It's not huge because Qualcomm has proven that they'll continue to half-ass support until the next product is announced and then they'll disappear into the ether.
I've had a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for 2 years, constantly trying to get Linux off the ground on it. Didn't happen (well, technically, toward the end of that period, there was an unsupported port of Ubuntu but it lacked half the drivers). And yes, when I bought it there was a very similar announcement from Qualcomm promising first-class Linux support. So I wouldn't gamble on it (especially considering that prices are crazy) until there indeed is a supported distro.
Yeah, I've really wanted an ARM Linux laptop. But I've known ARM is a crapshoot because of my dealing with other devices. So I held off on the initial X release. Then I saw the X1P (or whatever it was) and Qualcomm put out the exact same "someday Linux up streamed!" Promise.
A competent FTC would be fining them for these false and misleading statements. Until that happens, nobody should buy these thinking Linux will ever be supported.
It potentially can be a good thing, but anyone who is jumping up and down celebrating better wait and see, Qualcomm is more of a lawyer/finance company than a tech company in short a patent troll at heart, so it will be interesting to see what type of fee they want to have the privilege of being on their hardware. In the telecom area historically, they like double dipping.
But they support Android right? Won't that mean kernel support is public already? It would have to be merged into mainline. Or is this about something else?
I mean it technically can run linux. But I think non one actually got any desktop or graphics working. I hope it just happens but you are sadly correct here.
interesting. I mean day-to-day usage is a requirement if you want to buy some of these machines for real. But good to know that graphics works now. Last time I checked it wasn't and that was significantly after launch
Unless Qualcomm steps in and makes every laptop with their chip work flawlessly, I don't see a reason to step into their ecosystem. Right now it is basically flipping a coin when you buy an X1 or X2 product, as you are basically locked to the vendor's idea of 'support'. Qualcomm should coerce and collaborate with vendors to ensure their products are synonymous with great Linux support so that when I see their brand I know it is a good product.
Qualcomm hired some developers back from Linaria and they have been providing support for a bunch of X2 laptops these past two, three months directly via Linux ARM MSM mailing list. I'm surprised it took them this long to announce this publicly.
Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.
They give 2 separate dates for debian and ubuntu which looks to me they will just release drivers but haven't decided to be good citizen and have their drivers in the mainline kernel source tree.
In other words: it might be a trap and you could get screwed in n years if they stop maintaining it and some kernel changes make the driver not compilable on newer versions.
Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices. I bought a surprisingly capable Lenovo mini PC with a Snapdragon X at a massive discount and it's stuck on Windows 11 for now.
> Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices.
Is QCM slow to upstream or are they doing things in an incomplete manner or is there some other reason?
I'm trying to imagine a world where intel or amd releases a new platform/chip and it takes _two years_ to get linux booting on it
That's been my experience dealing with QCM based devices running linux in the past. Some OEM buys a batch of chips, gets a reference design and an old version of the linux kernel with a zillion out-of-tree hacks and patches that make updates impossible.
I generally advise clients to use rockchip as they have _very_ good mainline support and put any QCM modem at the end of a USB connection so it doesn't hold the product back.
That is why The Year of GNU/Linux desktop is never going to take off as such.
It was already proven by the whole netbooks, Android, WebOS, and ChromeOS.
Linux yes, as cost cut factor, and as means to power specific commercial products, running on top of WSL/Virtualisation Framework, or expensive racks on hyperscalers.
The whole community stuff, from OEMs point of view, only when it really has to be.
Wayland is a protocol that can be implemented by a compositor. Since Wayland intentionally chose to only support a subset of the functionality of a display server like Xorg, it became possible to rip out the Xorg specific hardware drivers and make the X11-supporting Wayland compositor known as XWayland possible in the first place.
"We're stuck with just a protocol that can have arbitrary implementations including full backwards compatible X11 servers"
If the upstream is properly done (that is a big if), this can be a go-to choice for the Linux laptop because it has much smaller config variations compared to Intel-based laptops: Everything from wifi (and even modem?), to audio, to camera ISP is included in the single SoC. If it works it works.
People have had a lot of issues with drivers and locked-down firmware on Snapdragon devices, so even with official Linux support for the chipset, the devices themselves could still be a nightmare to get working.
I don't think so. Every device has locked down firmware really these days, it's not an issue (most peoples BIOS/UEFI/etc is very much not open source).
If the drivers are upstreamed and good, it should work well.
Android phones don't need (and often don't have) upstreamed "drivers". They use qualcomm's closed-source code. Also, Android user land driver (HAL) isn't useful for non-Android Linux distros.
Yes, with proprietary blobs. Oh, and also running a version of the Linux kernel that’s been out of support for years (on some devices, not all).
This is the danger when you don’t upstream your shit. Now you’re stuck on kernel 3 or 4 because your chip vendor is lazy. And Qualcomm has got to be one of the laziest.
Finally, the dumb company woke up. On one hand, it’s good. On the other hand, bad Qualcomm is known as a patent troll. We shall see if they can mend their ways…
Part of this is probably motivated by the fact that Microsoft and Nvidia have teamed up.
How open will the boot stack be for this chip? Qualcomm has historically been pretty bad about this: mandatory closed-source bootloaders, mandatory closed-source hypervisors, mandatory closed-source TEEs, forked UEFI, etc.
An open Linux is hobbled without the rest of the stack.
This really is about business strategy than any technical effort these days. Porting code should be among the easiest things for the llms to do these days
Why only for these "desktop" socs? Why couldn't Qualcomm partner with Debian/Ubuntu to bring support to their mobile chipsets? Why can't Qualcomm partner with PostmarketOS to help recycle old devices and avoid e-waste?
Well, in case anyone else is wondering, I have the answer. That's because Google is maintaining a cartel, the "GMS" cartel in short. Due to intense lobbying and incredibly weak antitrust enforcement, this cartel still continues to operate globally, keeping soc makers like Qualcomm, Mediatek and Unisoc in chokehold. We won't see any real competition in the smartphone space unless it's destroyed, but market forces alone can't do that.
Google controls the Android ecosystem (restricts what OEMs can do) and employs various practices to ensure there's no alternative besides Apple (this duopoly suits both of them). Chipmakers essentially focus on ensuring they can sell access to BSPs which meet Google requirements, as there's no real alternative for smartphones. If you're not Apple, these chips are meant to be used with GMS Android, that's the expectation.
If there were alternatives (like on the desktop and for some parts of IoT) it would be more cost-efficient to upstream everything, but with the current situation it's fully up to Google.
When Google wanted them to move all their chip-specific code to modules (GKI), they had to do that. And if someone at Google randomly decided "hey, now you'll upstream this stuff", then guess what? They'd have to follow, it's how this monopoly works.
Funny how Qualcomm is juggling three OSes to sell these chips while Apple just stuck a phone chip in the Neo and called it a day. Controlling the chip, the OS, and the actual computer is a huge advantage. Apple is more than one study case on competitive analysis.
This is entirely Qualcomm's doing. If they supported Arm SBSA/UEFI+ACPI like some other Arm chip companies (e.g. Ampere) you could boot a generic Linux (or indeed BSD) Arm distro on their chips no problem. Controlling the entire platform is not necessary, just follow the standards.
Qualcomm expects to be paid. a toll/fee by each one of the Linux Distro’s for the privilege of being on the hardware with their chips in the device that is their history and one of the reasons why Apple spent five years kicking them out, they very definitely don’t act as a charity, so in the end, it will be interesting because someone is gonna pay their fee. the end user maybe?
All they have to do is support Windows and get their stuff upstreamed in the Linux kernel, no need for specific distro support. I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.
>I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings
So that if you want to use the next distro release you will be forced to buy their next-gen chip because that's the only supported one on that distro. D'uh.
What advantage? I'm always a bit shocked to see people say this without qualifying it at all.
On the contrary, Apple has to do a lot of greenfield work by refusing standards like UEFI, Vulkan and normal filesystems. They end up reinventing the wheel just to support the same featureset that Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and Intel all generally planned for.
Apple’s advantage is being the last vertical computer company from the 1980s speaks for itself. having control of the hardware and the operating system software with the ability to create new ecosystems is their advantage in comparison to hardware or software only companies, Note: the tech world would be a better place if Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn, Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois had been able to survive the Microsoft/Intel onslaught.
Apple didn't have to worry about that when they supported cross-industry standardization efforts. The only reason dGPUs are broken on macOS is because of Apple's software choices.
You sound very ridiculous. Why is Apple obligated? to follow Nvidia? or AMD? or Microsoft for that matter?
Intel said no to designing iPhone chips, IBM and Motorola couldn’t see a future of faster/better chips to meet the demands of future tech devices, Apple with that crazy CEO, Steve Jobs? Had to go it alone and the rest is history.
The Apple Silicon design group appears to be on a roll. What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will. Because that will be the only way they can build the devices they want to build at a reasonable price going forward.
Before you yell no what is it about the last 28 years have you missed? They seem to be able to execute long-range projects when it comes to hardware and software in comparison to their tech peers, looking forward to the M7 ultra, in-house memory and the C3 modem.
I really hope it's like 2031 and we're swimming in way too many of these. Running great Linux. How sick would that be. (And X4 is running mainline great too).
While I am somewhat negative on ARM/RISCV systems due to there being like 50 different boot systems and ASIC setups, I am cautiously optimistic that something like the A16 will end up unintentionally becoming sort of a standard via a large amount being sold.
I suspect in the next 5 years something like this will come up.
I hope Qualcomm upstreams all the device tree kernel level stuff to Linux for every laptop model. One of the things I don't like about Arm Laptops is—for example—how even if a SoC is supported upstream, if the manufacturer does not upload a device tree for their device, then you're cooked.
I read that while these Snapdragon laptops do technically have UEFI + ACPI, the information they provide is not useful for Linux and is more coupled with Qualcomm's proprietary drivers on Windows. Therefore, device trees are needed on Linux (I could be wrong about the first part).
I believe the Orin AGX is in a similar position. It does a UEFI boot but you absolutely have to supply a correct dtb and if you don't then key peripherals like USB and ethernet can just completely not work, or in one case I experienced, subtly malfunction in a way that appears to be fine but throws off a bunch of extra radiation that fails a certification test.
This is exactly what they have already been doing for the past two months, directly from their devs, posted to Linux ARM MSM mailing list, and despite not having all of the specs from manufacturers. See the EC driver submission for Asus ZenBook A16 from this past week.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like creating device tree should be relatively straightforward if driver support is there. So while having official device tree is awesome, it's not something that's very hard to do. Now writing drivers without datasheets, using reverse-engineering is something that's hard to do.
There was a recent proposal to make use of ACPI on ARM
https://www.phoronix.com/news/DT-ACPI-Hybrid-Mode-Linux
This is one of those situations, even if they don't want to release specific code, they could at least release the specifications so that others could build the software stack for this.
I don't think that ARM Laptops have a chance in Linux land as long as each model requires stuff like a custom DT.
I'm typing this on a Thinkpad x13s Gen1, "21BX000XGE". I really really like the device, best laptop I've owned so far, speaking strictly from a hardware perspective. No vents mean I can use it on a pillow, and it's dead silent. It never runs hot, great battery life. Thin and light, yet has all the performance I need. But would I recommend the laptop to any fellow Linux user? Absolutely not.
Even though it was released in 2022, the webcam still won't work. I can't limit the battery charge to 80% like on my x86 Thinkpad. There was a time when the graphics driver and Chromium didn't like each other and I had to wrangle Chromium into software rendering mode to avoid heavy artifacts on the screen (export force_gl_vendor="notfreedreno"). In fact, I still have the workaround in place. Not sure if it's still needed though. A fix was merged upstream last year, need to check whether it made it into Fedora yet.
I got the machine in 2025, and here are the workarounds and config changes I had to make just to get Fedora running last year, 3 years after release:
- extra kernel arguments ("arm64.nopauth" seems to be needed still in 2026, "clk_ignore_unused pd_ignore_unused" I have been able to remove at some point)
- GRUB config (GRUB_DEFAULT_DTB=/boot/dtb/qcom/sc8280xp-lenovo-thinkpad-x13s.dtb)
- initramfs modification, /etc/dracut.conf.d/x13s_firmware.conf: install_items+=" /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcdxkmsuc8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcadsp8280.mbn.xz /lib/firmware/qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qccdsp8280.mbn.xz ". Not sure if these are still needed, they were at some point.
In late 2025, installing Fedora was still a pain in the butt. There were custom-built ISOs for my device, but they didn't work because my firmware was too new. Stupid me ran a firmware update on the preinstalled windows. I tried building my own ISO, but the firmware never recognized those as a boot device for some reason (I have successfully built custom ISOs for x86 many times). In the end, I was able to use QEMU + chroot on my x86 machine to install Fedora ARM onto an external HDD, make the needed modifications in there, boot that on the laptop and run the anaconda installer, then make modifications to the install on the internal storage.
I just ran a quick `wc -w` on my installation and debug notes for the machine, and it's a cool 11180 words. At some point, it turned out that the display my unit uses was not in the list of known displays for the x13s. Seems that was mostly inconsequential aside from a kernel warning and maybe slower wakeup. Helped upstream with that, which eventually resulted in this commit: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/3330b71caff6cdc387f...
I'm no stranger to exotic architectures and machines, having used Gentoo on a ppc64le machine as a daily driver for 3+ years. And I do like the laptop. But w/o fundamental improvements to the way ARM bringup works, not just improvements for individual machines, I wouldn't recommend this stuff to any unsuspecting user.
I've been working on embedded systems using iMX8s, and it's equally awful. You have to maintain your own fork of UBoot. You have to spend hours tweaking device trees. The "NXP" kernel is out of date and never updated, the mainline kernel is missing loads of drivers.
Meanwhile in x86 land you can just download a distro and boot it. Secure boot works out of the box. It's night and day.
Have you looked at SoCs supported by Linaro?
Linaro is (or was, back when I was involved ~10 years ago) non-profit sponsored by SoC vendors to develop, maintain and upstream SoC support for Linux, along with running a comprehensive validation lab for all the boards they support.
A list of manufacturers did change a few times, and it was half-sponsored by ARM directly.
and speed doesnt matter at all if no drivers work
I think a lot of people don't realize the level of performance Qualcomm has reached with these. This is the closest competition to Apple's M series that we have, for the laptop form factor at least. They are better than Intel and AMD's best. I'd love to buy an X2 laptop with Linux preinstalled and supported.
I want to believe. It's just that we've seen similar announcements in the past and then nothing come of them.
This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
I’m glad we’re finally getting more competitors to Intel/AMD.
Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.
If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.
It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.
> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).
They must think they will sell more chips to OEMs that want to offer Linux. It's not like they're going to be shaking down Debian for cash.
If Apple cared about quality, they wouldn't have gotten rid of Qualcomm modems, and forced people to use the inferior Intel modems. I always avoided by iPhone models with Intel modems starting around the 6S era.
> Apple gets lazy on top.
A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.
Let me appropriate and rephrase a sentence from earlier in the thread: "performance per watt doesn't matter at all if the combination of the machine's feature set, both in hardware and software, as well as form factor, is essentially useless to you".
I have seen this far too many times on HN. A design that put Performance Per Watt first is how you extract more multicore performance when you are fundamentally limited by cooling.
Well, since an adequate cooling solution is a part of a machine's feature set for me, my point still stands.
Those that dream of an ARM ecosystem don't realise what they are getting.
Finally the end of IBM PC clones is taking shape.
And how exactly does that matter? How close do you have your head to x86 assembly for the instructions set to matter?
ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.
There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.
A computer is much more than an CPU chip, e.g. "PC 99 System Design Guide", among several other references.
But that's not answering my question? What do you expect to get from today's ARM chips that's fundamentally impossible otherwise? And how is that a step forward?
Again, a computer isn't a chip with nothing else.
In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.
The comment you're replying to is implying that in an ARM world nothing is standard, portable, or compatible by default. Think about smartphones: Every single one a bespoke board with bespoke hardware.
In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.
Couldn't agree more. I would LOVE a linux based laptop with the performance of the M series.
Intel panther lake is already very close. Good enough for me to be happy with it.
Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?
We get to blame OpenAI et al for this one again. AMD is using their current allocation of TSMC 3nm production to make Epyc rather than Ryzen so Ryzen is jumping from 4nm to 2nm. But 2nm Ryzen is still a few months out, and the 4nm current ones are naturally at a disadvantage when Qualcomm is using 3nm.
On paper, the M series is faster. It's not the same situation as when AMD and Intel were suprised by Apple, though. All of the tricks that made people go for the M1 Macs and think amd64 is dead are now also available on amd64.
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
With the help of vibe coding it might take a lot shorter time to get m series working on Linux. Though the quality of code is not guaranteed to be perfect.
I have a beefy AMD system and recently bought a macbook pro M5 pro. I'm still blown away by how much faster the M5 is than my AMD tower, while producing no heat or noise.
From what I can tell, you can get more total performance from intel/amd, but at the cost of more power draw, which besides needing more cooling also means shorter battery life.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
when it comes to Laptop Battery life afaik there isn't even a competition.
M series just always perform better than you expect. I don’t know how to explain it tbh. We use them for live streaming at work and they’re just never pushed to their limits (24gb mac minis) even as we run 7 or 8 independent HD sources + iso recordings of each one. They don’t break a sweat.
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
A lot of people do see the graphs. But reality is - unless they cooperate with lkml and merge it there is no point. Ubuntu has the only beta ISO for it - works not very good for the Lenovo. Qualcomm does not provide any support. Then people won't buy.
I'd buy one because I want a Lenovo Thinkpad with an onboard ethernet port and really good battery life for Linux.
The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. I also have the Snapdragon T14s which gets about 14 hours, but I'm still waiting to get full Linux support for this two year old laptop.
Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows
But I still get more than 10 hours on a charge.T14 gen7?
Benchmarks?
> closest competition to Apple's M series that we have,
Not very close at all, not even to the two-year-old model, it appears
https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-plus-loses-to-m4-in-4-out...
that's x2 plus. look for benchmarks of the x2 elite extreme, which currently is selling with 48gb ram for $1370: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-zenbook-a16-16-3k-oled-...
i wish that wasn't literally the only X2 EE system we could buy! (as i said a while ago in this submission, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823752)
nothing wrong with it! looks fine! just: there should be other products with the nice core. i could really use a 10-14" tablet. i mean, after all, ROG Flow 13 with a Strix Halo was not even that late after launch! dense is doable!
OK, i did.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/19122559
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/14591329
yup... still laughably behind by nearly 20%. And that is behind the M5, not even the current M6
> still laughably behind by nearly 20%
20% slower than the M5 is still a great result. I'm still using an M1 macbook pro, and it's more than fast enough for editing film, browsing the internet and writing code.
Especially when it is significantly faster than literally every non-Apple competitor. Including Intel and AMD's best desktop chips.
20% behind that's actually very impressive and if it will support Linux that's more impressive.
better than the closest linux alternative (M3 on asahi)
Check this chart. Single core performance is where Apple has dominated the most. Qualcomm is above every non-Apple competitor including desktop chips, and only 5% behind the fastest M5 MacBook Air (this chip is going into Air-class laptops). Yes, M6 is coming, but X2 has been available for months already.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
"Desktop chip" hasn't been a meaningful variable for single-thread performance in more than a decade. A single core can't use more than a given amount of power or it would melt and laptops have that much in their power budget.
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has twice the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-threadripper-9970x-9980x...
Yes, where desktops differ is not so much the chips but rather the cooling capability. You have the space to have proper air flow and water cooling etc. So that do give quite a bit of performance.
For Geekbench in particular, expect to gain a few percent in Linux vs. Windows. Of course, you should always look at your workload. The thing that causes me to wait for my computer the most is build times, where the multi-core benchmarks are more interesting than single core benchmarks, and these look like they could make for interesting low power dev boxes when/if proper Linux support lands.
OpenBSD developer Tobias Heider (tobhe@) has already committed the first pieces of OpenBSD/arm64 support for these Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops.
"This gets USB, keyboard and touchpad working in ACPI mode on the HP Elitebook X G2q."
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=178891082169317&w=2
Tobias (who also works for Canonical) recently demoed Ubuntu on mastodon and confirmed ARM EL2 works, meaning KVM support unlike previous generations.
bsd.network/@tobhe/117122761215052773
(I'd love to get my hands on one of these X2 Elite machines, hmu qcom.)
Give me something that is 80% as efficient, 80% as good hw as the apple m-series but runs Debian (or Ubuntu) and I am happy to pay apple+ prices for pure linux experience. I say this as someone who just bought a new m5 machine. I have seen framework/sys76 but never pulled trigger.
I don't really care about raw performance, just want long battery life, decent screen, and a *nix environment to work in. 99% of workload is going to be on a remote machine anyways.
This already exists. I got a Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 last year from Lenovo, and it shipped with Ubuntu, which made the price around $50 cheaper if I recall. I replaced it with Debian, of course, but the battery life is fine and it is a quiet machine.
I also purchased the T14s Snapdragon two years ago, and it gets longer battery life (if you just use a terminal only, the battery life remaining will sometimes say 20 hours, but it's more like 14-15 realistically). However, it can get uncomfortably hot on the left edge at the speaker. The T14s 2-in-1 (Intel) does not have any hot spots, though.
Look into something with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3. Performance is worse than the Apple M chips but you shouldn't have a problem running Linux and the battery life is good. I have a laptop with the previous generation of Intel chip (Core Ultra 258). The battery life is great, the computer never gets hot, and the fan rarely turns on (only if I'm doing like a long C++ compile or something, never for stuff like web browsing or watching videos).
I'm 90% sure a laptop with Intel core ultra 300 series processors would suit you well.
I have an HP AMD laptop with a Ryzen and have nothing to complain about, other than the loud cooling solution. It's a fast non-nonsense system. Also a no-frills physical design. Ubuntu works fully without any additional steps needed from me. I'm not sure what you're hoping the market will provide, apart from quieter cooling.
In case anyone else is wondering what they mean by linux support;
> We're upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2 Series — including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU — to open the door to developers and partners.
Glad this isn't going to be some semi-proprietary thing like support for chromebooks. Hopefully it continues.
Android is another famous example.
Historically speaking, between average Android device and average Chromebook, latter is far easier to get mainline kernel + "normal" Linux distro running, e.g: 8 Chromebooks vs. only 1 Android device (and even that is a dev. board) in official Arch supported hardware list:
https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms
Alas, new Chromebooks are no more. "Successor" Googlebooks are all Android.
> in official Arch supported hardware list:
ALARM isn't official Arch, so this also isn't an "official Arch supported hardware list". Arch is currently still only x86_64 and everything else is at best unofficial if not just straight up unaffiliated.
(do note that this might change soon-ish™ considering [0], but I think they want to first get their automated build infrastructure ready)
[0]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests...
So Arch on ARM is basically limited to an SoC with at most 8GB of RAM? It looks like we are still very far from a mainstream ARM motherboard with a socketed CPU, upgradable RAM and support for discrete GPUs. Until then, I see no reason to move away from x86.
As is WebOS, Raspberry PI, Beagle Boards, netbooks, PS2Linux, PS3 OtherOS,....
Regular OEMs will never give their differentiation factor freely.
Even Linux OEMs like Tuxedo apparently cannot get access to hardware specifications, and have to reverse engineer their own devices.
> this work is focused on laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series. It does not currently cover desktop form factors, earlier Snapdragon X platforms, or other development boards. Readiness also varies by OEM design and Snapdragon X2 Series variant.
So same ARM BS as usual - AMD and Intel x64 are still the kings when it comes to out the door Linux support.
I'll buy a ARM PC when I can swap its motherboard CPU and GPU to a newer gen and my existing Linux install boots up without having to flash a new bootloader and custom vendor kernel with proprietary GPU blob.
"I'll buy a ARM PC when I can swap its motherboard CPU and GPU to a newer gen and my existing Linux install boots up without having to flash a new bootloader and custom vendor kernel with proprietary GPU blob."
add in swappable batteries like older laptops and phones, and I would as well. not now though.
Makes me wonder how long until Framework starts shipping ARM-based motherboards. They already sell a RISC-V-based motherboard for the 13.
I think this is huge. I thought about getting one of these chips a long time ago, but linux support was just a breaker. I ended up sticking to my current laptop and getting a macbook some years after
The "original" X Elite was also supposed to get good linux support but it unfortunately never happened.
So hopefully the X2 will actually happen!
Every single one of the "X" series had this identical announcement.
It's not huge because Qualcomm has proven that they'll continue to half-ass support until the next product is announced and then they'll disappear into the ether.
This!
I've had a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for 2 years, constantly trying to get Linux off the ground on it. Didn't happen (well, technically, toward the end of that period, there was an unsupported port of Ubuntu but it lacked half the drivers). And yes, when I bought it there was a very similar announcement from Qualcomm promising first-class Linux support. So I wouldn't gamble on it (especially considering that prices are crazy) until there indeed is a supported distro.
Yeah, I've really wanted an ARM Linux laptop. But I've known ARM is a crapshoot because of my dealing with other devices. So I held off on the initial X release. Then I saw the X1P (or whatever it was) and Qualcomm put out the exact same "someday Linux up streamed!" Promise.
A competent FTC would be fining them for these false and misleading statements. Until that happens, nobody should buy these thinking Linux will ever be supported.
Yeah, this just sucks imo. I mean I think for the copilot button there was something upstreamed, but the useful stuff wasn't
It potentially can be a good thing, but anyone who is jumping up and down celebrating better wait and see, Qualcomm is more of a lawyer/finance company than a tech company in short a patent troll at heart, so it will be interesting to see what type of fee they want to have the privilege of being on their hardware. In the telecom area historically, they like double dipping.
But they support Android right? Won't that mean kernel support is public already? It would have to be merged into mainline. Or is this about something else?
I mean it technically can run linux. But I think non one actually got any desktop or graphics working. I hope it just happens but you are sadly correct here.
Nah, on many community-supported laptops, basically everything (including graphics) works fine with the exception of a few small issues and unoptimized power management. E.g. https://github.com/jglathe/linux_ms_dev_kit/discussions/36#d...
But it can be annoying to use day-to-day since a lot of stuff is not upstreamed or not integrated into the major distros.
interesting. I mean day-to-day usage is a requirement if you want to buy some of these machines for real. But good to know that graphics works now. Last time I checked it wasn't and that was significantly after launch
This is great news - the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 isn't too far off the Apple M5 Pro.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite...
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...
Sure, not too far, but single core perf is still. And also still very much behind the new M6 in single core and multi core https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/389219
Yeah, heard that 2 years ago for the Snapdragon X Elite
yeah everyone was hyped and it was said to be getting linux support. Some things were upstreamed into the kernel, but it never really got there
Unless Qualcomm steps in and makes every laptop with their chip work flawlessly, I don't see a reason to step into their ecosystem. Right now it is basically flipping a coin when you buy an X1 or X2 product, as you are basically locked to the vendor's idea of 'support'. Qualcomm should coerce and collaborate with vendors to ensure their products are synonymous with great Linux support so that when I see their brand I know it is a good product.
https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-coming-soon-to-qualcomm-sn...
Qualcomm hired some developers back from Linaria and they have been providing support for a bunch of X2 laptops these past two, three months directly via Linux ARM MSM mailing list. I'm surprised it took them this long to announce this publicly.
Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.
Ooh, an X2 Elite Extreme Framework laptop with Linux supported would be very tempting.
*Linaro, sorry for the typo
> Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.
My friend showed me his brand new Framework the other day, but I couldn't hear his spiel about its features over the noise of its fan!
Was that Framework 13 Pro? I thought these were supposed to have Panther and be much more efficient and quiet?
They give 2 separate dates for debian and ubuntu which looks to me they will just release drivers but haven't decided to be good citizen and have their drivers in the mainline kernel source tree.
In other words: it might be a trap and you could get screwed in n years if they stop maintaining it and some kernel changes make the driver not compilable on newer versions.
Didn't they say something similar about the first ones?
Consider me cautiously optimistic.
Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices. I bought a surprisingly capable Lenovo mini PC with a Snapdragon X at a massive discount and it's stuck on Windows 11 for now.
> Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices.
Is QCM slow to upstream or are they doing things in an incomplete manner or is there some other reason?
I'm trying to imagine a world where intel or amd releases a new platform/chip and it takes _two years_ to get linux booting on it
Yeah there was a blog post about it but seems not much came from the effort
> but seems not much came from the effort
That's been my experience dealing with QCM based devices running linux in the past. Some OEM buys a batch of chips, gets a reference design and an old version of the linux kernel with a zillion out-of-tree hacks and patches that make updates impossible.
I generally advise clients to use rockchip as they have _very_ good mainline support and put any QCM modem at the end of a USB connection so it doesn't hold the product back.
> Consider me cautiously optimistic.
Consider me dangerously pessimistic
If they want their platform to be a first-class citizen of Linux, they should commit on a mandatory device-tree release for all products.
Not some flaky "one release sometime after launch", a fully integrated release-chain for all components needed to boot Linux on any X2 series device
That is why The Year of GNU/Linux desktop is never going to take off as such.
It was already proven by the whole netbooks, Android, WebOS, and ChromeOS.
Linux yes, as cost cut factor, and as means to power specific commercial products, running on top of WSL/Virtualisation Framework, or expensive racks on hyperscalers.
The whole community stuff, from OEMs point of view, only when it really has to be.
Sounds good, as long as a standard Linux distro can replace whatever operating system ships with these machines.
Hmm... no news on whether there's X11 support or if we're stuck with just wayland.
X11 is ancient history and not a fit for tiling GPUs found in mobiles socs
Wayland is a protocol that can be implemented by a compositor. Since Wayland intentionally chose to only support a subset of the functionality of a display server like Xorg, it became possible to rip out the Xorg specific hardware drivers and make the X11-supporting Wayland compositor known as XWayland possible in the first place.
"We're stuck with just a protocol that can have arbitrary implementations including full backwards compatible X11 servers"
If the upstream is properly done (that is a big if), this can be a go-to choice for the Linux laptop because it has much smaller config variations compared to Intel-based laptops: Everything from wifi (and even modem?), to audio, to camera ISP is included in the single SoC. If it works it works.
People have had a lot of issues with drivers and locked-down firmware on Snapdragon devices, so even with official Linux support for the chipset, the devices themselves could still be a nightmare to get working.
I wonder how long someone can spend a pile of tokens and start shredding these firmwares down to their actual instructions/code.
I don't think so. Every device has locked down firmware really these days, it's not an issue (most peoples BIOS/UEFI/etc is very much not open source).
If the drivers are upstreamed and good, it should work well.
Aren't all the Android Snapdragon phones already mostly there?
Android phones don't need (and often don't have) upstreamed "drivers". They use qualcomm's closed-source code. Also, Android user land driver (HAL) isn't useful for non-Android Linux distros.
Yes, with proprietary blobs. Oh, and also running a version of the Linux kernel that’s been out of support for years (on some devices, not all).
This is the danger when you don’t upstream your shit. Now you’re stuck on kernel 3 or 4 because your chip vendor is lazy. And Qualcomm has got to be one of the laziest.
When can I buy one ?
I want the stuff to work, I want Qualcomm to provide an easy process to grab a X2 Elite Windows Laptop and install Linux.
No magical binary blob extraction. I want everything tested.
With SteamFrame out we might even get decent gaming !
Finally, the dumb company woke up. On one hand, it’s good. On the other hand, bad Qualcomm is known as a patent troll. We shall see if they can mend their ways…
Part of this is probably motivated by the fact that Microsoft and Nvidia have teamed up.
Support is coming because of Googlebooks, not because Qualcomm out of the pureness of their hearts is embracing GNU/Linux.
Expect binary drivers for specific releases of Ubuntu and Debian.
Also here is an answer to other day's why people still use Ubuntu.
I always imagined a world where the steam frame used an ARM chip as an ultimate f you for not only microsoft, but intel and amd.
Getting linux on the Surface laptop series would be amazing. Good battery life on a small laptop running linux is my ideal device.
The build quality of Surface seems quite good, seems like unibody aluminum.
The Snapdragon X chips are already wonderful with Windows 11 ARM64, so I'm pretty excited to see how much Linux will be able to squeeze out of those!
How open will the boot stack be for this chip? Qualcomm has historically been pretty bad about this: mandatory closed-source bootloaders, mandatory closed-source hypervisors, mandatory closed-source TEEs, forked UEFI, etc.
An open Linux is hobbled without the rest of the stack.
KVM works this time. For the rest you need to calibrate your expectations against mainstream laptops not RMStops.
Omg, words can't describe how completely botched the Snapdragon X series chip launches have been.
You hold them up to the Apple M series rollout and its just hilarious how far "the competition" is behind when it comes to laptop low power CPUs
Is it all upstream? Is there a newer part coming with upstream support on day 1 like every Intel laptop I’ve had for the last decade+?
https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2026/09/announcing-l...
Thanks. This link has more detail about Linux support. I submitted it separately for discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824189
yeah, heard that before...2 years ago.
Looks like they're learning!
Linux evry where haha washing_machine to trafic light evry single sector
i've been using a snapdragon x elite and loving it, albeit on Windows. 32GB ram
I have a 64gb ram one, love it.
I'd buy one on its public release date if it is linux ready.
A x2 based workstation will also be very cool.
6 years since M series and arm PC still hasn't picked up
This really is about business strategy than any technical effort these days. Porting code should be among the easiest things for the llms to do these days
Why only for these "desktop" socs? Why couldn't Qualcomm partner with Debian/Ubuntu to bring support to their mobile chipsets? Why can't Qualcomm partner with PostmarketOS to help recycle old devices and avoid e-waste?
Well, in case anyone else is wondering, I have the answer. That's because Google is maintaining a cartel, the "GMS" cartel in short. Due to intense lobbying and incredibly weak antitrust enforcement, this cartel still continues to operate globally, keeping soc makers like Qualcomm, Mediatek and Unisoc in chokehold. We won't see any real competition in the smartphone space unless it's destroyed, but market forces alone can't do that.
Tell us more about how it's Google who is preventing Qualcomm and Mediatek from upstreaming all their drivers?
Google controls the Android ecosystem (restricts what OEMs can do) and employs various practices to ensure there's no alternative besides Apple (this duopoly suits both of them). Chipmakers essentially focus on ensuring they can sell access to BSPs which meet Google requirements, as there's no real alternative for smartphones. If you're not Apple, these chips are meant to be used with GMS Android, that's the expectation.
If there were alternatives (like on the desktop and for some parts of IoT) it would be more cost-efficient to upstream everything, but with the current situation it's fully up to Google.
When Google wanted them to move all their chip-specific code to modules (GKI), they had to do that. And if someone at Google randomly decided "hey, now you'll upstream this stuff", then guess what? They'd have to follow, it's how this monopoly works.
Funny how Qualcomm is juggling three OSes to sell these chips while Apple just stuck a phone chip in the Neo and called it a day. Controlling the chip, the OS, and the actual computer is a huge advantage. Apple is more than one study case on competitive analysis.
This is entirely Qualcomm's doing. If they supported Arm SBSA/UEFI+ACPI like some other Arm chip companies (e.g. Ampere) you could boot a generic Linux (or indeed BSD) Arm distro on their chips no problem. Controlling the entire platform is not necessary, just follow the standards.
I don't think that would help with GPU or NPU, which another comment states are the drivers that Qualcomm are upstreaming.
Qualcomm expects to be paid. a toll/fee by each one of the Linux Distro’s for the privilege of being on the hardware with their chips in the device that is their history and one of the reasons why Apple spent five years kicking them out, they very definitely don’t act as a charity, so in the end, it will be interesting because someone is gonna pay their fee. the end user maybe?
AFAIk this has nothing to do with Qualcomm but with vendors and Microsoft.
All they have to do is support Windows and get their stuff upstreamed in the Linux kernel, no need for specific distro support. I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.
>I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings
So that if you want to use the next distro release you will be forced to buy their next-gen chip because that's the only supported one on that distro. D'uh.
> I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.
Because getting your stuff upstreamed in Linux is more work than releasing a custom kernel.
What advantage? I'm always a bit shocked to see people say this without qualifying it at all.
On the contrary, Apple has to do a lot of greenfield work by refusing standards like UEFI, Vulkan and normal filesystems. They end up reinventing the wheel just to support the same featureset that Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and Intel all generally planned for.
Apple’s advantage is being the last vertical computer company from the 1980s speaks for itself. having control of the hardware and the operating system software with the ability to create new ecosystems is their advantage in comparison to hardware or software only companies, Note: the tech world would be a better place if Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn, Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois had been able to survive the Microsoft/Intel onslaught.
Is it more work to support a completely proprietary boot path or three different "standard" boot paths?
Hint: you would know the answer if you are familiar with the Windows, Linux and OSX boot process.
Advantage of commitment and integration. Apple doesn't need to worry about critical vendors not cooperating because sticking with x86 is less risky.
Apple didn't have to worry about that when they supported cross-industry standardization efforts. The only reason dGPUs are broken on macOS is because of Apple's software choices.
You sound very ridiculous. Why is Apple obligated? to follow Nvidia? or AMD? or Microsoft for that matter?
Intel said no to designing iPhone chips, IBM and Motorola couldn’t see a future of faster/better chips to meet the demands of future tech devices, Apple with that crazy CEO, Steve Jobs? Had to go it alone and the rest is history.
The Apple Silicon design group appears to be on a roll. What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will. Because that will be the only way they can build the devices they want to build at a reasonable price going forward.
Before you yell no what is it about the last 28 years have you missed? They seem to be able to execute long-range projects when it comes to hardware and software in comparison to their tech peers, looking forward to the M7 ultra, in-house memory and the C3 modem.
aarch64 driver situation is still an unsolved mess. How far behind is thunderbolt support?
No Thunderbolt support is mentioned for Snapdragon X2 [1].
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...
It's called USB4 now.
Yay!
Please sell >1 model of computer with X2 EE (elite extreme) please please please. Not that #1 was bad at all but more please! https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-A16-Laptop-Review...
I really hope it's like 2031 and we're swimming in way too many of these. Running great Linux. How sick would that be. (And X4 is running mainline great too).
While I am somewhat negative on ARM/RISCV systems due to there being like 50 different boot systems and ASIC setups, I am cautiously optimistic that something like the A16 will end up unintentionally becoming sort of a standard via a large amount being sold.
I suspect in the next 5 years something like this will come up.
Ironically that's being fixed by Microsoft forcing UEFI.
Unironically, the serious reason I don't want to embrace Snapdragon, is because: Qualcomm.
If Microsoft and Nvidia team up work out, you won’t have to.
Lenovo has one (it's a Yoga, not a Thinkpad though).
Three cookie banners. I bet the announcement is slop that doesn't even answer relevant questions.
Weird, I only see one, even with ublock origin disabled.
Is your computer compromised? I see no banners.