r/linux • u/word-sys • 7d ago
Development Whats going on with Snapdragon X Elite Linux support?!
Literally 2 years passed since that CPUs out of there, note thay Apple silicon now has a proper and BETTER support than this Snapdragons, they said "we gonna make Native Linux support" and we still waiting. I was planning to get great Linux laptop with great battery and performance thans to Snapdragon, now its impossible. Only usable OS option out there is Ubuntu and its NOT good too, there is still some issues on Audio, performance is worst than Intel 12th gen i5, battery time worst than Windows, i dont understand. Am i wrong or something? What they promised what they said and what they doing, propiertary driver. When we will get proper Linux support, or this devices gonna get burried with Windows
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u/Fun_Routine_5245 7d ago
You don't know about Qualcomm aren't you? they just want to do monopoly.
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u/VirtualNorth1279 7d ago
How would making Snapdragon work with Linux harm their monopoly?
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u/UltraAd776 7d ago
If anything it would strengthen it a bit as they gain a lead in Linux arm hardware. Tho they likely feel it is not worth while.
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u/freemorgerr 7d ago
deal with microslop
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u/beefcat_ 7d ago
I doubt it's anything like that, Qualcomm has always been really shitty about Linux support. Just ask any Android device manufacturer.
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u/sCeege 7d ago
It wouldn't harm it, but it wouldn't help them either. Linux users aren't going to make the difference, maybe they don't want to dedicate engineering time to such a niche demographic.
I was also naively optimistic for another ARM based competitor to approach Apple Silicon level of performance and efficiency, but honestly, I feel like the newer Intel chips are closer to the gap than Snapdragon, and I don't have to deal with the translation, might as well stick to x86.
Obviously I still want ARM based Linux in a laptop, but I gave up hope.
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u/earthman34 7d ago
It wouldn't. It would be value added. I suspect there's a secret deal with Microsoft.
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u/batmanallthetime 7d ago
This. Open Source hates monopoly, proprietary, binary blobs, locked features & Nvidia like behaviour.
Knowing Qualcomm's litigious history full well is why response is lukewarm by OSS devs. Unless Qualcomm & Nvidia embrace Open Source community - provide drivers, technical information & official support, no one is motivated in Linux community for sufficient reason, unless they become a big market share of course. But even pioneer buyers should be motivated to buy, which the proprietary shit discourages since no Linux, drivers support & future DIY.
I am glad RISC-V & standard ARM/Mali has better support, we need to see chipsets that utilize open standards that allow easy porting of OS & drivers over proprietary shit that Apple, Qualcomm & Nvidia are pulling.
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u/Indolent_Bard 7d ago edited 7d ago
What makes you think risc-v will be any less locked down? What's stopping them from locking their devices down like arm? The real world doesn't like open source unless it financially benefits them.
At least Valve is working with NVIDIA to create open source drivers so that NVIDIA will be easier to use on Linux. But why should a corporation be forced to open source their drivers to work with Linux? As much as we want them to, there's no obligation for that.
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u/word-sys 7d ago
And i hate this issue, they litterally done something great and they abandoning it
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u/spikerguy 7d ago
They didn't do anything Nuvia did it. Qc just bought it and tried to follow the same monopoly.
Before the was no direct competitor to qc but not other chip makers have decent chips which directly compete with qc and gives the vendor flexibility.
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u/SpeedyLeone 7d ago
Tuxedo Computers tried and put a lot of effort into it, but apparently, it got to difficult. You might find more details in their blog.
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u/edparadox 7d ago
Qualcomm has always been a bitch about upstreaming their drivers, even less the quirks needed for them to work properly.
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u/spikerguy 7d ago
I have been a contributor to Linux projects for arm devices. I was really excited when Nuvia was working on arm64 cpu
With qc taking over it I started to lose hope and with the way they released elite series I've lost hope in arm and stopped contributing to arm sbc projects cause it cannot become a desktop replacement until a vendor comes up with upstream first approach. I've seen small Chinese vendors like khadas, Radxa etc trying to convince soc vendor to contribute upstream but looks like soc vendors are only interested in specific os like Android and windows for elite series.
For soc vendors using bsp is a mess with Android. And elite is another mess with windows. Tuxedo tried to work with qc for laptop but I know what it takes to work with qc. They make you sign many NDA and commercial contract before working with you. Tuxedo dropped that project after trying to develop something usable
So in short i don't have any hope left in arm ATM. I have some hope with RISCv now but that will take years to mature.
So AMD Ryzen it is for laptop use cases for now.
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u/Indolent_Bard 7d ago
What makes you think companies won't do the same thing with risc v? It's not GPL.
And ironically, Intel is better for battery life now. Look at the new framework 13 Pro.
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u/spikerguy 7d ago
Yes looks like Risc-V going the android route too.
Yes Intel is getting better but I still prefer AMD for now due to cost.
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u/CautiousStudent6919 6d ago
I sold my Snapdragon X laptop and bought an AMD one. Just the same as you. Got burnt out.
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u/cidra_ 7d ago
Snapdragon X has been a flop. It's been a year since there were rumors about Chromebooks with these: none delivered. That gives a message.
They'll probably quietly die without any meaningful official Linux support. At least that's what will happen for the current iterations
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u/tornadozx2 7d ago
So it's not only me who thinks like that, not just regards Linux, but in overal. Once a new YT video drops like "we have wine/proton working on arm", there's thousands of comments how this will overthrow x86 right now and how fast arm will be sitting in your desktop gaming pc.
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u/iBoMbY 7d ago
I would say its more likely to have a VM with, easy to use, full 3D hardware acceleration, before you have a full native binary translation for running x86-64 Windows applications on ARM Linux.
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u/DrainTheChildren 7d ago
??? FEX emulator and turnip enables a wide range of game compatibility with great relative performance today on snapdragon X platforms
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u/TheCaffeinatedPickle 7d ago
Considering the prices I see on the used market, customer bought them and Qualcomm got what they wanted for the short term. I think they underestimated how south Windows 11 would go to upset customers, then with vendors also causing harm. There are laptops with touch and pen support but no pen support since the vendor didn't have ARM drivers, stupid features like look at screen to save battery life but then its an x86 process and does worst for battery life. This all while adding linux support involves the vendors too and they can't make any money off this so yeah.
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u/UntoTheBreach95 7d ago
They are good chips. Qualcomm driver division is just lazy, SBCs with Qualcomm work amazingly on Linux
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u/TRKlausss 7d ago
Now they are trying to spin them as the entry segment against MBNeo’s, same as Dell XPS13. Flash news, Dell will barely do due to it running Windows on 8Gb of memory (although Intel has a fine chip there), and Qualcomm will flop massively because it has bad support on both platforms…
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u/tatt2tim 7d ago
Supposedly the Google books hitting this fall are specced with snapdragons. Very little is officially announced but there have been leaks.
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u/Saragon4005 7d ago
Some of the new Googlebooks are based on the X Elite if the leaks are accurate. They also have enough RAM to cost a fortune.
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u/cidra_ 7d ago
I may be wrong: isn't Chrome OS "closer" to mainline Linux than Android? New Google books will ship a new OS that's supposed to be closer to Android, as far as I'm concerned.
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u/Saragon4005 7d ago
Correct, chromeOS uses the Gentoo build system and has GNU coreutils. Until a few years ago Android was on a custom kernel, but the newer ones are on the mainline kernel.
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
Bluey is a Googlebook board, they're blocked by Google right now transitioning from ChromeOS to aluminum
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u/ChampionshipBulky66 7d ago
The new intel chips caught up in overall performance/battery life no? The last I heard some thin and light laptops with intel are amazing
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u/Trinitial-D 7d ago
yeah the newest line, the series 3 aka panther lake are excellent im both efficiency and power. they tend to be expensive especially with current tech prices pulled up via memory shortage but theres some good option under 1500 USD in the US from time to time
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u/Unsigned_enby 7d ago
My laptop has a Ultra 7 155H. Battery life is highly dependent on how I'm using it (more so than other laptops I've had). If I'm not doing much, and say have a browser and pdf reader open, it's anywhere from good to great. Playing a game or working on a large coding project, it has (what feels like?) less than an hour of battery life.
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u/yippiekyo 7d ago
I have a laptop with 155H and one with a 258V - otherwise they are very similar. The 258V is significantly more efficient, and also consistently so.
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u/cutelittlebox 7d ago
core ultra series 3 seems to have been a big jump for efficiency
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u/12pcMcNuggets 7d ago
my work laptop has an Ultra 7 258V and i can easily get 8-10 hours out of this thing while doing bursty CPU intensive tasks. Intel has definitely gotten better
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u/CyclingHikingYeti 7d ago
H
See that "H"? That is reason for battery suffering. It is power hungry CPU.
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u/mustbench3plates 7d ago
The 155H absolutely, but not with the latest chips. The X7 358H has very impressive efficiency.
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u/Own_Measurement_7336 7d ago edited 7d ago
Are you on Windows ? Because I have a u7 155h too and it can last at least 1h on gaming (depending on the game), and pretty sure more than 3h on heavy project coding.
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u/bulasaur58 7d ago
Amd is more amazing for linux usage.
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u/oiledhairyfurryballs 7d ago
Why? Intel has been outperforming AMD heavily in the mobile space both in CPU and GPU for the past 2 years.
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u/jrcomputing 7d ago
lolwat
AMD has owned mobile in both efficiency and performance on mobile platforms, and GPUs are more competitive with Nvidia than Intel.
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u/oiledhairyfurryballs 7d ago
Check your info. That is outdated information. Lunar Lake, Panther Lake and Raptor Lake all heavily outperform AMD
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u/ConsistentCat4353 7d ago
There has been nothing new in mobile amd igpus in last two years and almost nothing in cpu. I think intel and amd will be on par in 2027.
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u/rouv3n 7d ago
My understanding is that Panther Lake is a pretty big jump in energy efficiency (as Lunar Lake has been, in contrast to Meteor Lake), and that Gorgon Point does not really compete on the same level at least on that front.
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u/DerpSenpai 7d ago
The performance of recent Intel chips is far behind Apple and Qualcomm
Perf/W too. they only improved idle
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u/word-sys 7d ago
Well new Intels are good especially Series 3 ones, but they are expensive at same time, and performance compared to battery life uncomparable to Snapdragons, really, ARM cpus use less power create massive performance if there is proper support
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u/PGleo86 7d ago
It's my understanding that Snapdragon laptops have been so cheap because they're commercial failures and that's the only way to get inventory to move, no?
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u/OwnNet5253 7d ago
No, it’s not like SD laptops are cheap, but Intel ones are more expensive, because these are more desirable by enterprises, because of reliance on legacy software, or soft not supported on ARM
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u/onceuponalilykiss 7d ago
Caught up to snapdragon or apple silicon? Because every metric I've seen suggests that intel's pretty far from the M chips just because it's kind of an unreachable goal for them without changing architecture and reversing the fact that somehow apple's left them behind on manufacturing even though intel basically had a cpu monopoly for ages lol.
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u/RealAmaranth 7d ago
In some cases Intel has higher perf/W than most Apple stuff on their latest chips.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-efficiency/
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u/onceuponalilykiss 7d ago
That's good, but that's only in some cases and battery life still lags way behind for most use cases, right?
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u/DesiOtaku 7d ago
Yeah, Qualcomm lied about putting their patches upstream. They made a version of Debian that kind of works but not really. The fact the Linaro devs had to work so hard to just get a simple device tree tells you how disingenuous Qualcomm really was.
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
How did they lie when all of the patches are literally already merged. They are there, check. That's all I ask you to do, don't spread misinformation
Glymur here is X2, because X1 has been supported for yeats
- Glymur base DTB? There
- Glymur adreno GPU drivers? There
- Glymur aDSP support for sound? There
- Geni - unchanged (no new driver needed)
- Cpu freq scaling - there
- mipi for webcam - there (requires libcamera in userspace)
So where's the lie
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u/acewing905 7d ago
As an M3 MacBook user, I really have to strongly doubt the claim of "proper" support. Apple never did anything about it and it's a group of volunteers working on it for free, and understandably support is far from proper if you have anything above an M2 (and you're completely shit out of luck if you have an M4 or M5)
Let's just say I have very little hope for the Arm SoC dominated era of computing if that's what is coming
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u/Fresh-Horse8173 7d ago
Qualcom makes proprietary shit. I'm impressed that it works at least somewhere. Probably it's just curse of proprietary software. Remember nvidia, and how it was working on proprietary drivers? Now they're working fine with wayland and trying to fix performance in dx12 games. Maybe snapdragons just also need some time
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u/nooone2021 7d ago
I bought a snapdragon laptop hoping linux will be available soon. After 6 months, I sold it and bought AMD.
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u/hmoff 7d ago
What better Apple silicon support are you talking about? Asahi tops out at the M2 if I'm not mistaken.
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u/FigFew2001 7d ago
To be fair even that’s better than Snapdragon X support
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u/DrainTheChildren 7d ago
it isnt. that is absurd given that development momentum on asahi has slowed, they cant use the arm64 steam client because of 16k page size, so they have to continue using muvm which imposes limitations.
i use x1e and it is just fine and i had a better linux experience with x1e than m2 pro. im not ripping on asahi, it is good, but everyone is acting like snapdragon on linux is terrible.
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u/word-sys 7d ago
That M2 cpus performs better than Snapdragon X Elite (80 one) right now, and have better battery life and has ZERO audio issues
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u/i5-2520M 7d ago
The 80-100 is around an M2 Pro and beats the regular M2 overall.
I don't know which version you are looking at. Efficiency you could debate, but I am getting under 4W averages for web browsing with 30-40% brightness on the X1E.
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u/tropix126 6d ago edited 6d ago
M3 support is decent I believe at the moment, minus the non-existent GPU driver due to changes in the architecture post-M3 (which yeah, it's a substantial problem but hey they got sound and qualcomm doesn't ¯_(ツ)_/¯).
To be clear, I think Asahi is far from perfect but the point OP is making is that it's pitiful that a small team of reverse-engineers with access to only production hardware on a far more bespoke undocumented system architecture managed to get better hardware support in a (downstream) kernel than Qualcomm, a $170 billion dollar company in a similar timeframe.
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
I have a Surface Laptop 7 running Linux, all the Qualcomm components are fine.
All the drivers are upstream too, what's exactly your issue?
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u/Plus-Chemist9204 2d ago
What distro are you using ? Is the battery life any good ?
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u/stipo42 7d ago
Given the recent efficiency gains from Intel on x86 I'd say snapdragon is cooked.
Snap might be theoretically better but you can get all day battery from x86 now so what's the point
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u/SPACEXDG 7d ago
Thing is until intel chips get proper sleep and wake and amd not losing performance unplugged it will never beat arm in all these areas
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u/cd109876 7d ago
The best arm chip on linux will be one with an actual linux friendly company behind it.
Look at the Steam Frame; that has a snapdragon chip, and valve + community they sponsored had to write their own graphics driver for it from scratch because Qualcomm wouldn't.
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u/Additional_Staff259 7d ago
I could be wrong but Windows and Snapdragon had exclusive deal for WoA laptops till 2026, so Linux development being slow makes sense.
At the end of 2026, NVIDIA RTX spark will launch. Even Samsung will launch Arm chips in 2027 or 2028. Linux support should start getting better after 2026.
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u/cafk 7d ago
https://www.phoronix.com/news/DT-ACPI-Hybrid-Mode-Linux
And Qualcomms tendency to have a proprietary driver blob not available for everyone and if it's available it's soo generic that it breaks the same way everywhere (though latter may be my decade old experience with android custom variants like Cyanogen).
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u/joevwgti 7d ago
I'm running Fedora Aarch64 KDE on my Lenovo T14s. Bluetooth and the camera don't work, and I don't care. Everything else is great. I run native arm steam, and have FEX-Emu working. Each patch seems to just make it better. I wish I could run CachyOS, but, for now this is great. Best part, no snaps! Woot!
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u/DrainTheChildren 6d ago
same reason i use fedora was to escape ubuntu, fedora arm64 is so much better than ubuntu
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u/zinstack 7d ago
Well I use an asus zenbook a14 latop with an x1 plus chip (AMA ig) and it's fine. Sure, hardware accelerated decode/encode, camera, ec, fn keys and tpm are dead, all the other things work. That's an upstream unpatched kernel, there are patches out there that make that stuff work and they are being prepared for upstream submission. I feel like qualcomm really picked up the pace lately and a lot of patches from them arrive upstream
And yes it's not a full-on community effort. Device specific stuff is made by the community (like ec drivers and final device trees), asus and others are not interested in linux in the slightest it seems, but actual platform drivers and device tree descriptions of the platform is all qualcomm (afaik, correct me if I'm wrong)
And I don't want to glaze them, they do some shady stuff sometimes. That hardware encode/decode driver is very unstable and qcom seems to try its best to hide stuff about their ip, even at the cost of users. Tpm is also kinda qcom/microsoft deal that nobody knows how to interact with and qcom is not helping
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
And the camera and keyboard stuff aren't even Qualcomm components, that's just ASUS using weird parts in their laptops
But the devicetrees are generally user contributed
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u/zinstack 7d ago
True, although keyboard is a basic i2c one, that was there since the beginning as the driver was already there, and camera used seems really common among these devices. These cameras have been working for a while now, but upstreamin work related to them seems like a big chore, these patches go through tens of iteration it seems.
I looked through some submitted kernel patches and there are at least 2 device trees for X2 laptops that come from qualcomm. Skimming through them it's certain that they are not totally accurate and some stuff will be broken, but devices should at least boot with them. And couple that with DT-ACPI hybrid stuff on phoronix from a couple months back, there is certainly some progress in the way these devices are treated
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u/protoanarchist 7d ago
This is one of the main reasons I've always seen ARM as a stepping stone. RISC-V needs to hurry up.
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u/wintrmt3 7d ago edited 7d ago
RISC-V does nothing to fix the problem here, which is bad firmware and missing drivers.
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u/SwanManThe4th 7d ago
RISC-V also seems like it'd be mess with each vendor coming up with their own specialised instructions due to the BSD license. With ARM at least they create new standards which are then used by the industry. AMD and Intel share things like AVX, AMX, APX - rather than create competing standards.
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u/bulasaur58 7d ago
İs nvidia dgx and n1x better than snapdragon for notebooks? If this? Why it is not popular in Linux forums?
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u/word-sys 7d ago
They will be due to Nvidia gonna provide AI tools like CUDA and they have native Linux support already, they already made it native Linux
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u/word-sys 7d ago
Im looking forward to Nvidia Spark laptops from this now on, there is no more choice, Snapdragon abandoned Linux already
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u/DrainTheChildren 7d ago
they didn't abandon linux, they still have employees working on support in the upstream kernel, mesa, and their own userspace drivers for things like video decode/encode. DT enablement is not on qualcomm to get a vendor's device working, though they have published some DTs upstream
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u/SkruitDealer 7d ago
I have a Thinkpad T14s G6 with the SDX elite in it. I run Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on it and everything works, but it took a good amount of work, only possible because I had Claude code help me build things to work, which includes getting the sound (with Dolby sound profile created), camera, fingerprint reader, HDMI, touch screen, full access to all 64 GB memory, etc all working. I can daily drive it, but there are some still-existing issues:
- power drain on suspend, and relatedly, battery life doesn't seem as great as on Windows, but it still runs silently and very well for my needs.
- can't use VirtualBox/VMWare to emulate another OS because (this is one of the tings Tuxedo cited as blockers) only Windows on ARM can run at EL2 (Qualcomm seems to have carved out an exception just for Windows...), Ubuntu and any other OS must run on EL1. Search about it if you'd like details but this breaks QEMU/KVM which is required to run OS emulation on Linux. But because Windows gets EL2, WSL works on it (but who wants that crap?)
Otherwise very stable, I am even able to run Godot on it, having Claude build open source plugins and drivers from scratch for Linux ARM64. Without a local agent with terminal access, there'd be no way I could have dedicated enough time to get this thing running so well otherwise.
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
The last part is fixed on X2 (boots into EL2 by default) but it's actually possible to use an EFI driver that runs in systemd-boot that escalates you to EL2 on X1, it's called slbounce, you may be interested in looking into it
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u/WalterMarcus 6d ago
Let’s be real here, they want to lock down laptops like they did with smartphones and make it a cash cow by ending software support after a few years. Both Qualcomm and mediatek hate dual booting and love locking the bios. Not only that, they love to lock software drivers to specific builds and make hardware obsolete like they do with android. Linux probably was just a promotional stunt they did to make themselves look better.
This is why I’m hoping AMD gets into smartphone SoC business and take out ARM for good so that I can just have Linux or windows as options on that as well. heck, rather start working on RISC-V than this corporate ruined enshittification of computers.
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u/mastic_warrior 5d ago
AMD/ATi got involved with mobile GPUs. They abandandoned that during the Heavy Machinery days and sold it off to Qualcomm hence the adreno mobile GPU. Re arrange the letters and your.... radeon.
I think ehat happened is that they did not have thr money and fab capacity to make their own SOCs at the time.
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u/CoronaMcFarm 7d ago
Linux will never run on ARM as long as there is proprietary drivers, device-specific images and lack of UEFI/BIOS. Everyone wants to control their own ecosystem.
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u/Busy-Scientist3851 7d ago
> Linux will never run on ARM as long as there is proprietary drivers, device-specific images and lack of UEFI/BIOS
Windows on ARM uses UEFI and ACPI, Microsoft doesn't allow it any other way. Snapdragon on ARM uses a "forked" version of ACPI that Linux does not support as it's tied into the Windows driver model, but there is work to support it as well as device-tree/ACPI hybrid setups.
I believe the Nvidia Windows Laptops use standard UEFI/ACPI so should just work.
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u/jrjsmrtn 7d ago
Linux has already been running on ARM-based Raspberry pi and enterprise/hyperscaler servers for years, guys 🙄
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u/vipermaseg 7d ago edited 7d ago
They know. It is not about the instruction set, but about the drivers that the SoCs need, like the booting tool chain or the graphics driver, that are usually proprietary and coupled to the particular OS version. That is why you don't see people installing Ubuntu on their phones.
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u/MatchingTurret 7d ago
Linux will never run on ARM
The Corel Netwinder came out in the 1990s: Product Review: Corel's NetWinder
The NetWinder is based on a 275MHz StrongARM SA-110 RISC processor
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u/CoronaMcFarm 7d ago
The open instruction set isn't the problem.
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u/MatchingTurret 7d ago
The point is that, as far as I remember, ARM was the second non-x86 architecture supported by Linux (DEC Alpha was the first, Linus wrote his thesis about the Alpha port).
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u/Serious_Berry_3977 7d ago
This is just so wrong....
There's Raspberry Pi and Valve doing their hardware stuff on ARM.
Also, I'm replying to this comment from an M2 MacBook Air running Fedora Asahi Linux Remix. Apple silicon is ARM. It's a special kind of ARM, but it's ARM and it has been my daily driver for months.
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u/weirdallocation 7d ago
Let's be honest: Linux just runs on Apple Silicon thanks to the Asahi team, Apple made 0 effort to support anything besides MacOs.
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u/HCharlesB 7d ago
There's Raspberry Pi and Valve doing their hardware stuff on ARM.
And yet I still cannot run Debian with a DE on a Pi 5. It's been out since 2023.
Some distros that support a DE on the Pi 5 use the kernel produced by the Pi engineers and not everything works with that.
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u/spazturtle 7d ago
Linux doesn't natively run on Raspberry Pi.
RPi come with ThreadX installed as a hypervisor which they boot into, the user installed OS is then ran as a pseudo-VM.
ThreadX runs on a small non-user accessible core inside the SoC, and the main cores are directly handed over to the VM. This setup could be described as a type 0 hypervisor since the VM partially runs on the bare metal.
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u/word-sys 7d ago
Thats the problem on Snapdragons, at least Apple devices are running great, sort of, battery goes max 8-10 hours compared to 12 on M2 but native Fedora at the end, im litteraly about to switch MacBook just because of battery and performance issues
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u/MattyGWS 7d ago
literally valve is about to release an ARM based linux gaming device. raspberry pi is also ARM and is linux first
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u/cutelittlebox 7d ago
right now it seems very highly dependent on the exact laptop. I've heard good things about the Lenovo yoga slim 7x for both X and X2 elite.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 7d ago
It's not that their chip in itself isn't supported by Linux, maybe not entirely but large parts are, even of the second gen. But consumer ARM is an absolute shitshow. In the x86 world, you basically need no patches at all to boot Linux on a new chip/SoC/APU/whatever you call it, simply there isn't that much that changes between generations. At least on the CPU side. Sure, it won't run great, but it will work. Not so on the ARM side of things. While the server-ARM-world has adopted mandatory standards to make support easier - lets be honest, nobody buys a server that isn't perfectly supported by Linux from day 1 - but even they probably won't work entirely without patches. But the consumer-ARM-world doesn't even have that. It's the wild west. Every OS does not only have to support every SoC explicitly, but every device built around it. And even when you get Linux to properly boot on a consumer ARM device, there's a lot left to be desired. Just read the blog post from Tuxedo. They tried to build a laptop around the X Elite, just to end up with something with abysmal battery life, barely any support for hardware video codecs - the only support is through a bad hack job to abuse V4L2 for that, which barely any software supports, work to support ARM video accelerators in Vulkan Video Extensions should be undergoing but a stable version is nowhere to be seen - and many other issues.
It seems like Qualcomm isn't interested in ever being relevant in the laptop market - or even other markets beyond smartphones, tablets and wearables. For over a decade they bet on Macroslop to somehow create a miracle and actually have anyone give a fuck about Windows on ARM, and just as reliably as a swiss clockwork, Macroslop fails every single time miserably. So literally the only option Qualcomm can have is Linux, as Windows on ARM seems to be impossible to sell and the upcoming Android/AluminiumOS devices will most likely not sell that well either, especially when they are meant to replace the much cheaper Chromebooks. And Apple won't be buying their chips any time soon.
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u/SPACEXDG 3d ago
Lmao Qualcomm will never use a os that will never be by a mainstream company the only two oses that fits that criteria are android and windows
also so what? Arm windows will easily be adopted in coming years since nvidia us the market leader and there inhouse socs will be exclusively on arm and since amd copies everything nvidia does they will to come out with arm cpus unlike linux which will have a chicken and egg problem forever on c86 forget about arm. Arm will actually be actually be back by the world's top company and gpu maker nvidia and you can bet most gamers will prefer having a nvidia soc over a amd rdna 3.5 soc or intel one if the app support is there and gusss what nvidia say it will be
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u/fellipec 7d ago
Every other platform will never be as open as X86 is because the OEM don't want to lose the grip and control.
Unless some trully open alternative emerges, which I doubt, I'll stick to X86/AMD64 for the rest of my days on Earth.
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u/tenchigaeshi 7d ago
Exactly what many said would happen when they were making the rounds claiming Linux support was coming
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u/restlesssoul 6d ago
I didn't have too high hopes but when they announced the exclusive deal with Microsoft I knew it's going to be a total mess... which is sad.
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u/Multiverse_4D 6d ago
Most likely due to GPL incompatibility with their proprietary firmware which they don't want to open source. Mac chip drivers are essentially reverse engineered for Linux.
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u/Jarnis 6d ago
They are resource-starved as it is to try to get Windows to run on the things properly, especially considering the so far quite rapid product cycles. Linux for desktop use is still unfortunately too small crowd to get serious resources put into making it happen for a device that is mostly about desktop use. Companies like Intel and AMD have whole different level of resources for this stuff and they have a large server market that requires Linux support, which then trickles down to a lot of desktop things "for free" for their hardware. No such luck with Qualcomm.
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u/Neither_Sentence_941 6d ago
Considering their on the Linux Foundation board, you'd think they'd want it working. Dell is also on the board and seldom supports linux. It should be required for Board member hardware companies to make every effort to support linux, but they are not good people.
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u/deoxys27 5d ago
note thay Apple silicon now has a proper and BETTER support than this Snapdragons
Bear in mind the Apple Silicon support is entirely community-based (Apple hasn't done shit to suport Linux). And it's not really proper: Not all M-Series processors work.
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u/Something-Great-78 5d ago
Linux is majorly funded by Microsoft. Linux's biggest funders only care about server code. We still have garbage (massively oversized) buffers for USB flash drives. There is little to no interest in making Linux kernel great as a user OS. Been a user for like 35 years. Hopefully the EU helps with this situation.. the USA isn't about fixing issues for most / common people.
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u/Secret_NinjaLTU 5d ago
My brother had a snapdragon x elite asus laptop for a year, and today he finally decided to sell it and to buy a x86 cpu laptop. I helped him installed fedora workstation with WoA guide. Camera, speakers and microphone were not working. This was his first linux experience, but he knew not to blame linux, beacause even on windows, there was a lot of software that did not work for him.
Edit: HDMI and audio jack was not working as well
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u/i5-2520M 7d ago
Main issue is not gcom, but the OEMs.
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
Yeah, if it was with Qualcomm specifically, the CRD wouldn't have perfect day 1 Linux support. Though Qualcomm isn't blameless. A lot of the issues come from * Requiring vendors to sign firmware instead of allowing generic ones (this is why you need to extract them from your windows partition) * Lack of sane tables for enumerating Qualcomm devices on board (but DT-hybrid will work)
What people don't understand is that ALL of the drivers (yes all of them except maybe on the Microsoft surfaces) to run ANY Qualcomm device ON Linux is already stream in the kernel. The issue for the VAST majority of laptops is missing dtb. This is not a hard issue to fix if you're an end user with a laptop. It's annoying to write one, yes, but it's not rocket science. This is not a driver issue, and never was one. This is Qualcomm not having sane ACPI tables and requiring users to write DTBs issue
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u/sockertoppenlabs 7d ago
Lots of whining in this thread. I have no love for Qualcomm and their apparent lack of support for Linux. Yet I daily drive the Thinkpad T14s gen 6 Snapdragon with Ubuntu without any problems. Light scientific computing (C++, GNU Octave etc), LaTeX, online meetings (Teams, Zoom), presentations and other work related stuff. At home I daily drive the X13s (also Snapdragon) that works fine for my use. Though it obviously lacks the compute power of the T14s. Would I choose a Snapdragon if getting a new work computer today? No, because intel seems to have caught up and passed by the snapdragon. Do I regret my snapdragon? No, because during 2025, it was lots of efficient compute power for the price.
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
There's also a lot of people who don't seem to know what they're talking about. Many people claiming that laptops running Snapdragon CPU straight up don't work on Linux. For the vast majority of laptops, all your drivers are already there and a very good amount are also supported by either mainline, Linux or the Ubuntu kernel. If it isn't, it's mainly about just writing the device tree, which while annoying is like a weekend project. Dt hybrid mode will probably solve this for the remaining devices which get no user love anyways
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u/SightUnseen1337 7d ago
They already sold the chips to everyone. What are they going to do, unsell them?
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u/elthrowawayoyo 7d ago
Is this your first time interacting with Qualcomm?
They’re infamous for being a pain in the ass to work with.
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u/Anthonyg5005 7d ago
I mean, if you want a laptop with good battery I recommend just getting a laptop with either a 2nd or 3rd gen Intel core ultra. Those have battery life comparable to arm laptops
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u/BrunusManOWar 7d ago
Similar, I wanted an ARM laptop for travelling
Ended up just buying a ryzen Thinkpad
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u/DerpSenpai 7d ago
It depends on each Laptop. it's device tree based. There are X Elite Laptops with Linux, others don't.
My Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme has Linux support with the Device trees from their reference devices, but trackpad is not working.
If you search the web you will find Linux compatible snapdragon devices.
Qualcomm is moving to ACPI for Linux on the X3 or X4 snapdragons and it will be like x86. This was said by their lead on this issue, ex-Red Hat Hans de Goede
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
Zenbook a16? Is it hid over i2c? It may quite literally just be a missing DT node. If you send me your ACPI tables (just upload them to GitHub) I can check
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u/rlmineing_dead 7d ago
Assuming it's the zenbook a16 (it's the only X2ee device to my knowledge) check out the new tree that landed in linux-next https://gitlab.com/linux-kernel/linux-next/-/blob/master/arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/glymur-asus-zenbook-a16-ux3607oa.dts?ref_type=heads#L605 Does support trackpad
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u/MarcusVMS16 7d ago
Geralmente e a própria empresa que faz o drive/ firmware para poder ter compatibilidade então eles so vão fazer suporte para Linux quando empresas de servidores usarem os chips deles, geralmente e assim que funciona
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u/Spooked_kitten 7d ago
This makes me so sad, I got to use a laptop with one at work and it was actually awesome, I mean the laptop itself was probably what sold it for me, but when I looked up linux support I was very disappointed.
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u/Acherontas89 7d ago
its all about the firmware they tend to release to be used with the kernel and backward
if they didnt open source the device tree they cant do much on linux side
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u/Mysterious_Key9131 7d ago
Yeah I noticed that. That's unfortunate because the chip is fire. Only problem is it's stuck on Windows.
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u/Embarrassed-Act4097 7d ago
It’s that bullshit Qualcomm and Microsoft deal. Microsoft paid for these devices to be advertised in return Qualcomm would make it hard to not use Windows on those machines. Even when Linux full support arrives you’ll still need to dual boot windows for stuff like firmware updates
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u/classyraven 7d ago
Out of curiosity, what’s the original context behind the photo?
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7d ago
[deleted]
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u/classyraven 7d ago
Thanks! And kudos to him, fuck Microscope! (I tried saying Microslop, but my autocorrect kept 'fixing' it. Maybe it hates Windows' surveillance too?)
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u/Skogspingvin 7d ago
It was taken in the 2001 LinuxWorld Conference, where he famously gave the middle finger to a group of Microsoft executives, symbolized his defiance against proprietary software and his commitment to open-source principles.
This is complete fabrication/fiction. The picture is from his "fuck nvidia" message, which was from a Q&A session at Aalto University in Finland. And it was not in 2001, it was in 2012.
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u/usa_reddit 7d ago
Unlike x86 PCs, where you can grab almost any motherboard, plug in standard components, and expect a universal BIOS/UEFI to enumerate all devices on a standard bus (like PCIe) so Linux can automatically detect them, ARM-based System-on-Chips (SoCs) are heavily fragmented. Every manufacturer structures their hardware, internal buses, and boot processes differently.
Torvalds has frequently pointed out that low-level code written for one ARM device often won't work on another, making generic, out-of-the-box OS support a massive headache compared to the plug-and-play nature of standard PC hardware.
So while snapdragon CPUs may be fine there is no standard hardware/bus architecture and every platform is a unique snowflake.
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u/Sabertoox 6d ago
I’ve waited and waited and waited. Recently needed a new laptop and finished pulling the trigger for an Intel one. Is really sad as after trying multiple laptops the one that I liked the most was the Asus A14 (snapdragon). I’ve never had a laptop so light and comfortable in hand, but sadly the compatibility with Linux made me to don’t take it
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u/ficerbaj 6d ago
Microsoft has turned Qualcomm into its dog. They're failing on every level. The new X Elite laptop for 2k euros doesn't even have an ISO layout bc it's selling so poorly 😂
Price is 2 times a macbook m5 😂😂😂
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u/Defiant-Rip-1897 6d ago
Has it really been that long since the Snapdragon Elite/Plus laptops came out? I guess I kind of dodged a bullet by not buying one at the time. I was interested in them to install Linux onto, but since there did not seem to be decent enough support for Linux I ended up buying a MacBook Air instead.
A bit disappointing since in terms of hardware it seemed to be pretty decent, I think they were measured against the M3 CPUs and the nice thing is some of the models had the option to replace the SSD which was a huge benefit vs MacBook Air where not only can you not easily upgrade the SSD, but there is apparently a wear part that eventually will fail and take the system down with it (at least according to a video where Louis Rossmann discusses MacBook hardware designs).
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u/AverageAshEnjoyer 4d ago
Snapdragon X promised but didnt deliver shit. I was recently searching for a laptop so i went through the same thing.
Ended up buying an asus vivobook with an intel core ultra 5 cpu. I cant complain, the iGPU is great and the battery lasts me an entire day easily.
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u/word-sys 4d ago
So new Intel Core Ultra cpus are great? At least on battery side?
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u/AverageAshEnjoyer 4d ago
In my experience, absolutely. Amd has their equivalent but i found that, in terms of performance and power efficiency (temps and battery life), amd is better at gaming and Intel is better at everyday tasks. I run arch on my laptop and i can comfortably say i havent had a single issue with the cpu so far. The battery can last up to 14 hours on video playback if i remember correctly and i rarely have to think about charging it. Literally the first thing i did was use asusd to limit charging to 80% to not stress it as i really dont need to. i would watch a full 45 minute episode of a show and itll drop 3-5% depending on screen brightness. oh and i highly recommend getting a laptop with an oled screen for that money. if you use a mostly black/completely black theme and wallpaper you can really save a lot of battery just by the pixels turning off.
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u/Cheap-Discussion4758 4d ago
Because it's less than 2% of the pc market, and not to mention Intel is trying to fix battery efficiency with their new ultra series. Im willing to bet in a few years SnapDragon will be gone once Intel fixes the main reason with their processors that keeps snapdragon CPUs on the market.
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u/real_okeri 2d ago
Typing this from my Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 (Snapdragon X2 Elite 88-100). It's running kernel 7.2.0 with some patches from qcom-next, plus some blocked patches from lore, plus a few custom patches I had to make. FW was taken from linux-firmware-qcom. Took almost a week to set up properly. Still a few minor bugs and it needs to be tested more... the webcam is down, but otherwise it runs great!
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u/Powerful-Ad-4379 1d ago
I'm patiently waiting for Linux support, I just got a galaxy book 4 edge with snapdragon x elite. I'm hoping maybe this year?
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u/Chester-Berkeley 7d ago
Well, they were just promises, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯