Posted by aaronday 14 hours ago
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).
Instead Qualcomm should improve their ACPI implementation and improve the kernels handling of it
This is definitely a thing in some embedded systems I’ve used. There are some Marvell boards which do this. They all use U-boot though.
Phoronix should have revised that article, it's completely misleading.
On Windows, Qualcomm ships custom drivers that override normal ACPI platform logic in various places, IIRC
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.
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.
Sometimes the SDK is a zip of the developer workspace in a pseudo working state with no clear records of all that's been patched.
Vendors providing binary only kernel and system images containing god knows what is not uncommon either.
I'm convinced now that arm hardware vendors are simply incapable of even understanding what proper software support is. I'm sure some of their devs do their best but management does not care. By the time the chip ships, efforts move to making the next thing so they never properly finish the software side.
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.
Why? In theory the UEFI firmware can pass Linux a devicetree. Not much different to different laptops having different ACPI tables.
It's not necessarily any better on Windows. I've worked with Qualcomm based laptops that wouldn't work without a bespoke Windows image from the manufacturer. I also had one where the "generic" ARM Windows image wouldn't work with it even though it should've and the manufacturer never provided a bespoke image.
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
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.
For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.
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?
They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.
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.
Which is fine. Have a great day.
Finally the end of IBM PC clones is taking shape.
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.
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.
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.
What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.
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.
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.
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.
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
energy-full: 50.61 Wh
energy-full-design: 58 Wh
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...
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!
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
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.
I think we have a different definition of what laughably means. Especially since A16 is 25% ahead of M5 in multithreaded.
You're still trying to deliver your original point after you were told you use the wrong reference and you're not doing a good job.
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...
"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.)
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.
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.
No wifi, no bluetooth, no fingerprint reader, no hardware accelerated 3D..
There is a special version of Ubuntu that largely works (it's a bit old) and if you dist-upgrade to a new version it will break.
I spent about a week trying to get it working and just gave up, awful experience.
> 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.
https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms
Alas, new Chromebooks are no more. "Successor" Googlebooks are all Android.
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...
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.
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.
add in swappable batteries like older laptops and phones, and I would as well. not now though.
The "original" X Elite was also supposed to get good linux support but it unfortunately never happened.
So hopefully the X2 will actually happen!
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite...
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...