2025-11-2119:46208158www.tuxedocomputers.com
ATTENTION: To use our store you have to activate JavaScript and deactivate script blockers! Thank you for your understanding!
Read the original article
Comments
It's a shame that this didn't end up going anywhere. When Qualcomm was doing their press stuff prior to the Snapdragon X launch, they said that they'd be putting equal effort into supporting both Windows and Linux. If anyone here is running Linux on a Snapdragon X laptop, I'd be curious to know what the experience is like today.
I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.
By foxandmouse 2025-11-220:071 reply The iGPU in Panther Lake has me pretty excited about intel for the first time in a long time. Lunar Lake proved they’re still relevant; Panther Lake will show whether they can actually compete.
By bytehowl 2025-11-2218:57 Lunar Lake had integrated RAM, right? Given certain market realities right now, it could be a real boon for them if they keep that design.
I'm typing this from a snapdragon x elite HP. It's fine really but my use is fairly basic. I only use it to watch movies, read, browse, and draft word and excel, some light coding.
No gaming - and I came in knowing full well that a lot of the mainstream programs don't play well with snapdragon.
What has amazed me the most is the battery life and the seemingly no real lag or micro-stuttering that you get in some other laptops.
So, in all, fine for light use. For anything serious, use a desktop.
What is it about it that makes it unsuited for anything serious? The way you describe it, the only thing it's not suited for is gaming, which is not generally regarded as serious.
Many people including myself do serious work on a macbook, which is also ARM. What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
> What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
Everything else around the cpu. apple systems are entirely co-designed (cpu to work with the rest of the components and everything together to work with mac os).
While i'd love to see macbook-level quality on other brands (looking at you, lenovo) tight hardware+software co-design (and co-development) yields much better results.
By jorvi 2025-11-2214:49 Microsoft is pushing hard for UEFI + ACPI support on PC ARM boards. I believe the Snapdragon X2 is supposed to support it.
That still leaves the usual UEFI + ACPI quirks Linux has had to deal with for aeons, but it is much more manageable than (non-firmware) DeviceTree.
The dream of course would be an opensource HAL (which UEFI and ACPI effectively are). I remember that certain Asus laptops had a microstutter due to a non-timed loop doing an insane amount of polling. Someone debugged it with reverse engineering, posted it on GitHub, and it still took Asus more than a year to respond to it and fix it, only after it blew up on social media (including here). With an opensource HAL, the community could have introduced a fix in the HAL overnight.
I get the lacking Linux support, but what about Windows? Most serious work happens on Windows and their SoCs seem to have much better support there.
Apple's hardware+software design combo is nice for things like power efficiency, but so in my experience so far, a Macbook and a similarly priced Windows laptop seems to be about equal in terms of weird OS bugs and actually getting work done.
I’m getting about 2 hours with current macos on an arm macbook pro. I used to get 4-5 last year.
This is out of the box. With obvious fixes like ripping busted background services out, it gets more than a day. There’s no way normal users are going to fire up console.app and start copy pasting “nuke random apple service” commands from “is this a virus?” forums into their terminal.
Apple needs to fix their QA. I’ve never seen power management this bad under Linux.
It’s roughly on par with noughties windows laptops loaded with corporate crapware.
I run an old T480 with FreeBSD and get about 17 hours of battery out of it. Sure, it’s a bit thicker but gets the job done as a daily driver.
By speakspokespok 2025-11-2215:032 reply There is literally no way. Spill the beans!
By NaomiLehman 2025-11-2214:112 reply for this to happen we would need to see a second company that controls both the hardware and the software and that's not realistic, economically. You can't just jump into that space.
By sofixa 2025-11-2312:33 Microsoft with their Surface line? They don't control every part of the hardware, but neither did Apple control even the majority before the M series.
You could argue that is exactly what Tuxedo is doing. In this case, they could not provide the end-user experience they wanted with this hardware so they moved on.
System76 may be an even better example as they now control their software stack more deeply (COSMIC).
By RestartKernel 2025-11-2216:52 I was incredibly excited when they announced the chip alongside all kinds of promises regarding Linux support, so I pre-ordered a laptop with the intention of installing Linux later on. When reports came out that single core performance could not even match an old iPhone, alongside WSL troubles and disappointing battery life, I sent it back on arrival.
Instead I paid the premium for a nicely specced Macbook Pro, which is honestly everything I wanted, safe for Linux support. At least it's proper Unix, so I don't notice much difference in my terminal.
By AlotOfReading 2025-11-2123:311 reply Equal effort is far more likely from Qualcomm than hardware docs. They don't even freely share docs with partners, and many important things are restricted even from their own engineers. I've seen military contractors less paranoid than QCOM.
I'd have to say that full hardware documentation, even under NDA, is prerequisite to claim equal effort. The expectation on a desktop platform (that is, explicitly not mobile, like phones or tablets) is that development is mostly open for those who want to, and Qualcomm's business is sort of fundamentally counter to that. So either they're going to have to change those expectations (which I would prefer not to happen), provide more to manufacturers, or expect that their market performance will be poor.
By Wowfunhappy 2025-11-221:38 If they don't provide hardware documentation for Windows either (a desktop platform), how can it be a prerequisite for equal effort?
By userbinator 2025-11-227:262 reply Qualcomm could've become "the Intel of the ARM PC" if they wanted to, but I suspect they see no problem with (and perhaps have a vested interest in) proprietary closed systems given how they've been doing with their smartphone SoCs.
Unfortunately, even Intel is moving in that direction whenever they're trying to be "legacy free", but I wonder if that's also because they're trying to emulate the success of smartphone SoC vendors.
I don't know if the prospect of being the "Intel of ARM" is very appealing when you can manufacture high-margin smartphone SOCs instead. The addressable market doesn't seem to be very large; any potential competition is stifled by licensing on both Microsoft and Softbank's side.
The legend of Windows on ARM is decades old, and people have been seriously trying to make it happen for at least the past two decades. They're all bled dry. Apple is the only one who can turn a profit, courtesy of their sweetheart deal with Masayoshi Son.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-2219:21 Well that would have an obvious solution. Go make RISC-V CPUs for phones etc. until you get good enough at it to be competitive in laptops, at which point Microsoft gets interested in supporting you and you get to be the Intel of RISC-V without dealing with Softbank.
The extent PCs are open is an historical accident, that most OEMs would rather not repeat, as you can see everywhere from embedded all the way to cloud systems.
If anything, Linux powered devices are a good example on how all of them end up with OEM-name Linux, with minimal contributions to upstream.
If everyone would leave Windows in droves, expect regular people to be getting Dell and HP Linux at local PC store, with the same limitations as going outside their distros with binary blobs, and pre-installed stuff.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-2219:171 reply OEMs don't care about that. It's Qualcomm in particular that sucks. If you buy a Linux PC from System76 it comes with their own flavor of Linux but it's basically Ubuntu and there is nothing stopping you from putting any other version you want on it. The ones from Dell just use common distributions.
Meanwhile Linux is getting a huge popularity boost right now from all the PCs that don't officially support Windows 11 and run Linux fine, and those are distribution-agnostic too because they didn't come with it to begin with.
By summa_tech 2025-11-2215:321 reply I mean, part of that is the difference between how easy it is to build a platform in Linux vs how hard it is to get into the tree. This is actually, in my mind, a major change in the Linux development process.
Nobody expected Intel to provide employees to write support for 80386 pagetables, or Philips to write and maintain support for the I2C bus. The PC keyboard driver was not sponsored and supported by IBM. Getting the code into Linux was really easy (and it shows in a lot of the older code; Linux kernel quality standards have been rising over time), because everyone was mostly cooperating on a cool open-source project.
But at some point, this became apparently unsustainable, and the expectation is now that AMD will maintain their GPU drivers, and Qualcomm (or some other company with substantial resources) will contribute code and employees to deal with Adreno GPUs. This led to a shift in reviewer attitudes: constant back-and-forth about code or design quality is typical on the mailing lists now.
This means contributing code to the kernel is a massive chore, which any person with interest in actually making things work should prefer to avoid. What's left is language lawyers, evangelists and people who get paid to sit straight and treat it as a 9-5 job.
The Asahi and pmOS folks have been quite successful in upstreaming drivers to the kernel (even for non-trivial devices like GPU's) as enthusiast contributors with no real company backing. The whole effort on including Rust in the Linux kernel is largely about making it even easier to write future drivers.
> I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips.
Depends why the Snapdragon chips were relevant in the first place! I got an ARM laptop for work so that I can locally build things for ARM that we want to be able to deploy to ARM servers.
Surprising. Cross compilation too annoying to set up? No CI pipelines for things you're actually deploying?
(I'm keen about ARM and RISC-V systems, but I can never actually justify them given the spotty Linux situation and no actual use case)
By mort96 2025-11-229:04 Cross compilation is a pain to set up, especially if you're relying on system libraries for anything. Even dynamically linking against glibc is a pain when cross compiling.
Linux on arm is probably the most popular computing device platform in the world.
By wryun 2025-11-239:42 Which doesn't mean that it's easy to use an ARM device in the way I'd want to (i.e. as a trouble-free laptop or desktop with complete upstream kernel support).
We do have ARM CI pipelines now, but I can only imagine what a nightmare they would have been to set up without any ability to locally debug bits that were broken for architectural reasons.
I guess you must be doing trickier things than I ever have. I've found docker's emulation via qemu pretty reliable, and I'd be pretty surprised if there was a corner case that wouldn't show on it but would show on a native system.
By Marsymars 2025-11-2321:12 Not really trickier, but different stack - we’re a .NET stack with a pile of linters, analyzers, tests, etc. No emulation, everything run natively on both x86-64 and ARM64. (But prior to actually running/debugging it on arm64, had various hang-ups.)
Native is also much faster than qemu emulation - I have a personal (non-.NET) project where I moved the CI from docker/qemu for x86+arm builds to separate x86+arm runners, and it cut the runtime from 10 minutes in total to 2 minutes per runner.
It's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries.
Outside the embedded space, cross-compilation really is a fool's errand: either your software is not portable (which means it's not future-proof), or you are targeting an architecture that is not commercially viable.
By Marsymars 2025-11-2217:58 > It's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries.
This is what we largely do - my entire team other than me is on x86, but setting up the ARM pipelines (on GitHub Actions runners) would have been a real pain without being able to debug issues locally.
Do the Lunar Lake chips have the same incredible standby battery times as the Snapdragon X's? That's where the latter really shines in my opinion.
By StillBored 2025-11-2218:47 I have a couple generation back amd laptop that can 'standby' for months.. its called S4 hibernate. Although at the same time its set for S3 and can sit in S3 for a few days at least and recover in less time than it takes to open the screen. The idea that you need instant wakeup when the screen has been closed for days is sorta a niche case, even apple's machines hibernate if you leave the screen closed for too long.
That isn't to say that modern standby/s2-idle isn't super useful, because it is, but more for actual use cases where the machine can basically go to sleep with the screen on displaying something the user is interacting with.
By tester756 2025-11-2211:48 Yea, Lunar Lake made hit into ARM, but Panther Lake should be even stronger hit
By christophilus 2025-11-221:13 Roughly the same on my Intel Lenovo. It’s a great little machine. And Linux runs nicely.
I fully expected this. I really wanted to get the Snapdragon X Elite Ideacentre just because I wanted an ARM target to run stuff on and if I'm being honest the Mac Minis are way better price/performance with support. Apple Silicon is far faster than any other ARM processor (Ampere, Qualcomm, anything else) that's easily available with good Linux support.
I am so grateful to the Asahi Linux guys who made this whole thing work. What a tour de force! One day, we'll get the M4 Mac Mini on Asahi and that will be far superior to this Snapdragon X Elite anyway.
I remember working on a Qualcomm dev board over a decade ago and they had just the worst documentation. The hardware wouldn't even respond correctly to what you told it to do. I don't know if that's standard but without the large amount of desire there is to run Linux on Apple Silicon I didn't really anticipate support approaching what Asahi has on M1/M2.
By LeFantome 2025-11-2217:25 A tour de force indeed. Asahi Linux only works as well as it does because of the massive effort put in by that team.
For all the flack Qualcomm takes, they do significantly more than Apple to get hardware support into the kernel. They are already working to mainline the X2 Elite.
The difference is that Apple only makes a few devices and there is a large community around them. It would be far less work to create a stellar Linux experience on a Lenovo X Elite laptop than on a M2 MacBook. But fewer people are lining up to do it on Lenovo. We expect Lenovo, Linaro, and Qualcomm to do it for us.
Fair enough. But we should not be praising Apple.
Apple provide even less documentation than Qualcomm. Let that sink in.
By ronsor 2025-11-2217:13 Wrong documentation is perhaps worse than no documentation. Although Apple provides little, at least it is usually accurate, and what's left you know you must reverse engineer.
By adastra22 2025-11-2220:50 Unfortunately with the main reverse engineers of the Asahi project having moved on, I very much doubt we will see versions working on more recent M-series chips.
By c2h5oh 2025-11-2217:14 Qualcomm doesn't bother to upstream most of their SoCs. They maintain a fork of a specific Linux kernel version for a while and when they stop updating it or new version of Android requires newer kernel then updates for all devices based on that SoC end.
They have little experience producing code that is high enough quality it would be accepted into Linux kernel. They have even less experience maintaining it for an extended period of time.
