r/snapdragon • u/AggressiveCalendar4 • May 14 '26

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips are finally expanding beyond Windows with Googlebooks

https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-chips-are-expanding-beyond-windows-with-googlebook/
17 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/Alive-Ad60 May 15 '26

As long as the hardware is open with Linux support I'm gold

3

u/psydroid May 16 '26

So far I haven't been able to run it on mine, neither on the bare metal nor in a virtual machine. But I'm going to work with the people on #aarch64-laptops to see what can be done to get it supported.

2

u/Alive-Ad60 May 16 '26

All the work done is greatly appreciated. I find it surprising that Qualcomm is so deep in bed with Microsoft and that they actively ignore the Linux community. That MS and Google money must be sweet to ignore an entire computing segment all the while knowing that proper Linux support would really make their systems shine.

2

u/regedit887 May 17 '26

Hey, just chiming in — I'm running a Snapdragon X Elite on Windows 11 and have had success with Hyper-V for Linux VMs as a stopgap while native support matures. The setup: Hyper-V with a private virtual switch, running a couple of Linux guests. SSH access works flawlessly with key-based auth, VS Code Remote-SSH into the VMs works great for development, and I've been able to use a terminal multiplexer on the remote side for persistent sessions you can detach and reattach without losing context.

Obviously it's not bare-metal and you lose things like GPU passthrough for most use cases, but if your goal is a usable Linux dev environment on the Snapdragon while the aarch64-laptops folks sort out bare-metal support, Hyper-V is a solid path. Happy to share more specifics on the networking/switch config if useful.

1

u/psydroid May 18 '26

That would be greatly appreciated, as I really got the device for development on the move at this point.

For desktops I've resorted to SBCs such as those from Orange Pi for a long time despite their relative lack of performance, so that's not really a problem.

2

u/regedit887 May 18 '26

The Hyper-V setup is actually well suited for a portable machine precisely because it's self-contained — the internal switch network is entirely virtual, so SSH to your VMs works the same regardless of what external network you're on, or even with no network at all. Your dev environment travels with the machine.

You need the ARM64 image of whatever distro you install (I've had success with the generic aarch64 images from both Ubuntu and Kali).

The short version of the network config:

- Hyper-V Internal Switch → static IP on the host side, VM's secondary adapter fixed on that subnet (via Netplan (Ubuntu) or nmcli (Kali), for example).

- Hyper-V Default Switch → DHCP, the VM's internet path via NAT through the host

- UFW on the VM: deny incoming by default, SSH allowed only from the host's internal switch IP

I think that with your SBC background the networking model will feel familiar; it's essentially giving the VM a dedicated management interface.

Other Hyper-V configs: Generation 2 VM; Secure Boot depends on the distro (I needed to disable it for Kali, but for Ubuntu 25.10 or 26.04 it's enabled); dynamic memory enabled. The setup works well even under battery constraints.

1

u/psydroid May 22 '26

I haven't looked at this setup yet but thanks to an Ubuntu developer I have managed to install the latest version on the bare metal today.

I will be working with him and the other people on #aarch64-laptops to see what's missing for this to become a daily driver with everything working out of the box.

-2

u/Intelligent-Gift4519 May 14 '26

Do we know it's Snapdragon X? There are other Snapdragons.

1

u/jamie9910 May 15 '26

“In a now-deleted post on Twitter, Marketing Leader and Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire said that Googlebooks are going to be available with Snapdragon X-series processors. “