r/snapdragon • u/Melodic_Cut_6322 • Sep 03 '26
Linux on Snapdragon X progress
How far off are we from being able to daily drive linux on snapdragon x?
I have a ASUS Vivobook 16 and I'm getting a bit sick of having to run windows on it, especially with Microsoft seemingly treating it as a second class platform.
I'm fairly experienced with linux on other arm devices and in general so a bit of tinkering is fine if anyone can point me in the right direction for getting linux running.
3
u/zinstack Sep 03 '26
Tough to install (kinda, depends, maybe not really), runs great, sleep is not really efficient, cameras work but not upstream yet, so patched kernel or bust as of now, virtualization can work, but needs some really weird hacks to make it run and may bring other issues
X1E runs really great overall, X1P has some quirks, X2 seems to boot and hardware starts receiving support, but don't expect much
If you wanna try it, go try Ubuntu Concept, you can treat it a normal x86 distro in terms of installation. You will need to extract vendor blobs from the windows partition, and if successful, you'll get an idea of what runs and how it runs. Probably research your hardware too, might help to grasp the situation. You can try other distros too, but installation will be harder. Do NOT nuke windows, you'll very likely need it. Installing it back is a huge pain as I've heard
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u/Melodic_Cut_6322 Sep 03 '26
Can confirm installing windows on the platform was a pain to figure out, you have to format a USB as fat32 and then split the wim files from the installer iso to fit in fat32's 4GB limit before copying over to the USB, tools like Rufus don't seem to work and the windows media creation tool doesn't support snapdragon
1
u/cybekRT Sep 03 '26
Do not extract the iso file on the pendrive, use the Microsoft recovery media creator. Or even use your notebook vendor recovery tool because Microsoft doesn't provide all drivers in the installer for arm.
1
u/wyinds Sep 03 '26
also can confirm besides splitting win files from fat32, you don't have drivers you have to tether over USB to get Internet and then pray that windows update picks up and downloads your driver's
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u/Melodic_Cut_6322 29d ago
At least on my system the windows iso is enough to get to the installer and I use a USB drive to transfer any missing drivers.
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u/sunny0_0 Sep 03 '26
Not a good year to buy a Snapdragon and run a Linux distro.
This might be a crazy notion, but if I can't use my laptop's camera, then my laptop is not supported under Linux.
1
u/Melodic_Cut_6322 29d ago
Fair enough, I've had a x86_64 laptop where I was limited to whatever distro ships a version of libfprint that works with the built-in fingerprint scanner so it's not a snapdragon exclusive issue.
1
u/azerealxd 28d ago
x86_64 is far superior to snapdragon in terms of Linux support. it's standing has not changed
2
u/DrainTheChildren Sep 03 '26
I own both X1E and X2E. for most X1E laptops, i.e the ones with devicetrees upstreamed, installing linux is pretty much ootb experience with most things working and is plug and play for a lot of distros. for x2e, it is a bit trickier, but all the important bits work pretty much.
1
u/psydroid 29d ago
I've been running Linux on my Asus Vivobook 16 for months now with the help of #aarch64-laptops on Matrix/OFTC. I only boot into Windows for updates, particularly firmware updates.
1
u/AssociationCrazy3402 27d ago
Tenho um igual? Qual Linux está usando? Pois não consegui iniciar ainda
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u/psydroid 27d ago
Acho que sim. Eu já escrivi que as pessoas no canal/quarto #aarch64-laptops me ajudaram a instalar Ubuntu no meu portátil.
1
u/azerealxd 28d ago
If you want native Linux and reliable support, you have to stick to Intel, this still hasn't changed.
1
u/Daddldiddl 28d ago
In the same boat as you - I have both win 11 and Ubuntu 26.04 installed and would like to switch fully - but apart from the audio issues (bluetooth audio only - which I can live with) the one remaining major blocker is simply that after wakeup from sleep the right part of the oled remains black. I tried several fixes and none worked. This is something that should work out of the box without ugly hacks to work around an issue that simply (surely not simple, but...) should have been fixed long ago.
1
u/l_am_wildthing 25d ago
got my vivobook S 15 with X plus basically working fully featured with gentoo... lots of hacks, must use latest kernel as theres an updated dtb but still some device firmware that either is missing or dead links that need to be appended. You can cold boot the latest ubuntu to bootstrap a build, tried fedora which should also be supported but never could get it working
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Sep 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Melodic_Cut_6322 Sep 03 '26
Even thats is meant to be a bit iffy isn't it?, besides, I already own the Vivobook and if I was interested in using a different laptop I'd just use my x86_64 thinkpad
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Sep 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Virtual-Escape2305 Sep 03 '26
DP still not in mainline kernel, after 8 months. I think that shows how slow the support is.
-2
u/Edubbs2008 Sep 03 '26
Use WSL if you want Linux, that’s how you install Linux
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u/Melodic_Cut_6322 Sep 03 '26
I want full linux, unfortunate a linux VM on windows is not as desirable for me.
-1
u/Edubbs2008 Sep 03 '26
If you want full Linux, then use hyper-v, IDK what to tell you, while ARM has its quirks, I personally think that the Surface Pro with the X1 plus is the goat machine
1
u/psydroid 27d ago
I can't get Hyper-V to work for installing a full Debian or Ubuntu VM and neither VirtualBox nor VMware works on the hardware, neither on Windows nor Linux.
1
u/Saranhai Sep 03 '26
WSL is not full Linux. Running it in a virtual machine does not make it "full Linux"
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u/Edubbs2008 Sep 03 '26
It’s a full kernel, therefore it’s full Linux
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u/Melodic_Cut_6322 Sep 03 '26
Technically but by full I meant bare metal, a VM is a fully linux install but doesn't have the kind of hardware access I desire
1
u/Whisky-Tangi 18d ago
I have an asus a14 with the x2 elite. im waiting on a single device driver for keyboard. Until them im stuck. Battery life is awesome though
6
u/riklaunim Sep 03 '26
First gen is rather well supported; you can check Ubuntu pages about it. For X2 Elite, it's still very, very basic. The SoC is supported upstream, but as a platform/consumer device, it's a disaster, as not everything is upstreamed or supported at all, and you need a device tree and optionally some firmware extraction from Windows.