Back in mid-2024, the Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers teased plans for developing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop. Initially they hoped to have it out by Christmas 2024. That didn’t happen and now approaching Christmas 2025 they confirmed they have stopped their plans for shipping a Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop for Linux customers.
Earlier in 2025 they confirmed various obstacles they had been hitting with the Linux support around the Snapdragon X Elite effort. They did get to posting Linux kernel patches for the Device Tree on their planned laptop. As recently as in early November they posted the latest Linux DT patches for their ARM laptop with the effort appearing to still be ongoing – even with Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops for Windows on ARM now coming about.
I know nothing about what it takes to develop a laptop. Are these issues (BIOS updates, virtualization support, USB4 support, etc) something the laptop manufacturer needs to develop solutions for in-house? Wouldn’t that be the job of Qualcomm? Or are Tuxedo saying that these things aren’t supported on the Linux side yet? Qualcomm claimed to be contributing to the kernel last year, so idk if that just hasn’t happened yet or if they just lied.
Either way this is disappointing, but understandable. There’s no sense in working to release a laptop with previous-gen hardware that’s not going to be competitive.
Hopefully https://libreboot.org/ will be able to provide us more options with their FOSS bios/UEFI.
My understanding is that most of this is down to ARM’s (relative) lack of standardization. Consumer ARM SoCs don’t even have ACPI, so you aren’t even guaranteed to be able to do things like powering off the system. Qualcomm pretty much has to add some minimum support for their SoCs to the kernel because most of their consumers will want to get Android working on them, but that doesn’t mean they’ll do more than they have to for that.
There’s a reason you can install Linux on any x86 PC and it will mostly work, but you can’t install an ARM Linux on a phone. Even Android forks like Lineage don’t support all Android phones, even though they’re shipping basically the same thing the manufacturers are.
definitely. Qualcomm provides the SoC and drivers for what comes on that package, but you’ll want to add a battery controller, power controls, and other embedded systems onto the motherboard to make it act like a real system. it’s also a way different boot process in my experience than a normal x86 platform. the difference between ARM and x86 isn’t just the instruction set. plus at this level nothing is ever plug and play.
as for how Valve was able to ship an ARM device, they stuck to the normal kinds of IO a mobile device with a SD8gen3 would have and already have a great OS for fast iteration that they have tight controls over.
i’m excited for this XElite line, but i can see how it’s not in Qualcomm’s best interest to spend their engineering labor on porting to desktop Linux, not with Microsoft and Dell etc already having bids on that time. as long as Qualcomm is upstreaming and not actively blocking open source development, i don’t understand the kind of resentment i see for them. because they work with Google? i see them becoming more open as they become more prolific outside of embedded systems and Android. i see it as an exposure problem.