Facts are Linux support has heavily accelerated from both Qualcomm and Linaro on their behalf. Anyone who watches Linux ARM mailing lists can attest that.

Things have definitely changed, a lot.

Hardware has already been out for a year. Outside a custom spin by the ubuntu folks, even last years notebooks arent well supported out of the box on linux. I have a Yoga Slim 7x and I tried the Ubuntu spin out at some point - it required me to first extract the firmware from the Windows partition because Qualcomm had not upstreamed it into linux-firmware. Hard to take Qualcomm seriously when the situation is like this.

Qualcomm _does_ upstream all their firmware, but vendors usually require a firmware binary to be signed with their keys, which are burned into the SoC. As a result you cannot use Qualcomm's vanilla firmware and need to extract the original firmware as provided by the vendor, otherwise it won't load. This is an actual security feature, believe it or not. Besides, chances are it wasn't even Qualcomm's firmware, but rather Cirrus for sound or display firmware, etc.

I get the hate on Qualcomm, but you're really one LLM question away from understanding why they do this. I should know, I was also getting frustrated before I read up on this.

I get where youre coming from but I think the job of a company pushing a platform is to make it "boring". ie it should work out of the box on debian/fedora/arch/ubuntu. The platform vendor (Qualcomm) is the only one with enough sway to push the different laptop manufacturers do the right thing. This is the reason why both Intel / Windows push compliance suites which have a long list of requirmements before anyone can put the Windows / Intel logo on their device. If Qualcomm is going to let Acer / Lenovo decide if things work out of the box on linux then its never going to happen.

Fantastic.

Can you please let me know if there is an ISO to get any mainstream Linux distro working on this Snapdragon laptop ?

ASUS - Vivobook 14 14" FHD+ Laptop - Copilot+ PC - Snapdragon X

It's on sale for $350 at Best buy and if I can get Linux working on it it would definitely be an awesome gift for myself.

Even if there's some progress being made, it's still nearly impossible to install a typical Linux distro on one of these. I've been watching this space since the snapdragon laptops were announced. Tuxedo giving up and canceling their Snapdragon Linux laptop doesn't instill much confidence

There's an Ubuntu release specifically targeting new Qualcomm Elite based laptops: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-concept-snapdragon-x-e...

This includes Vivobook S15, not sure about the 14.

That covers the Elite, not the cheaper Snapdragon X laptops such as the ASUS Vivobook 14 (X1407QA).

I've followed that thread for almost a year. It's a maze of hardware issues and poor compatibility.

From your other response.

>but vendors usually require a firmware binary to be signed with their keys, which are burned into the SoC. As a result you cannot use Qualcomm's vanilla firmware and need to extract the original firmware as provided by the vendor, otherwise it won't load.

This makes the install process impossible without an existing Windows install. It's easier to say it doesn't work and move on.

It's going to be significantly easier to buy run Linux in an X86 laptop.

Not to mention no out of the box Linux Snapdragon Elite laptop exists. It's a shame because it would probably be an amazing product.

This sounds a lot like how AMD’s approach had changed on Linux and still everyone I know who wants to use their GPU fully used Nvidia. For a decade or more I’ve heard how AMD has turned over a new leaf and their drivers are so much better. Even geohot was going to undercut nvidia by just selling tinygrad boxes on AMD.

Then it turned out this was the usual. Nothing had changed. It was just that people online have this desire to express that “the underdog” is actually better. Not clear why because it’s never true.

AMD is still hot garbage on Linux. Geohot primarily sells “green boxes”. And the MI300x didn’t replace H100s en masse.

Maybe it's just that you're mostly viewing this through the LLM lens?

I remember having to fight with fglrx, AMDs proprietary Linux driver, for hours on end. Just to get hardware-acceleration for my desktop going! That driver was so unbearable I bought Nvidia just because I wanted their proprietary driver. Cut the fiddling time from many hours to maybe 1 or 2!

Nowadays, I run AMD because their open-source amdgpu driver means I just plonk the card into the system, and that's it. I've had to fiddle with the driver exactly zero times. The last time I used Nvidia is the distant past for me. So - for me, their drivers are indeed "so much better". But my usecase is sysadmin work and occasional gaming through Steam / Proton. I ran LMStudio through ROCm, too, a few times. Worked fine, but I guess that's very much not representative for whatever people do with MI300 / H100.

> and occasional gaming through Steam / Proton

And how does that work on AMD? I know the Steam Deck is AMD but Valve could have tweaked the driver or proton for that particular GPU.

I play lots of games on a AMD GPU (RX 7600) for about a year and I can't remember a game that had graphical issues (eg driver bugs).

Probably something hasn't run at some point but I can't remember what, more likely to be a Proton "issue". Your main problem will be some configuration of anti-cheat for some games.

My experience has been basically fantastic and no stress. Just check that games aren't installing some Linux build which are inevitably extremely out of date and probably wont run. Ex: human fall flat (very old, wont run), deus ex mankind divided (can't recall why but I elected to install the proton version, I think performance was poor or mouse control was funky).

I guess I don't play super-new games so YMMV there. Quick stuff I can recall, NMS, Dark Souls 1&2&3, Sekiro, Deep Rock Galactic, Halo MCC, Snow runner & Expeditions, Eurotruck, RDR1 (afaik 2 runs fine, just not got it yet), hard space ship breaker, vrising, Tombraider remaster (the first one and the new one), pacific drive, factorio, blue prince, ball x pit, dishonored uhhh - basically any kind of "small game" you could think of: exapunks, balatro, slay the spire, gwent rougemage, whatever. I know there were a bunch more I have forgotten that I played this year.

I actually can't think of a game that didn't work... Oh this is on Arch Linux, I imagine Debian etc would have issues with older Mesa, etc.

Works very well for me! YMMV maybe depending on the titles you play, but that would probably be more of a Proton issue than an AMD issue, I'd guess. I'm not a huge gamer, so take my experience with a grain of salt. But I've racked up almost 300 hours of Witcher3 with the HQ patch on a 4k TV display using my self-compiled Gentoo kernel, and it worked totally fine. A few other games, too. So there's that!

Don’t know what LLM lens is. I had an ATI card. Miserable. Fglrx awful. I’ve tried various AMDs over the last 15 years. All total garbage compared to nvidia. Throughout this period was consistently informed of new OSS drivers blah blah. Linus says “fuck nvidia”. AMD still rubbish.

Finally, now I have 6x4090 on one machine. Just works. 1x5090 on other. Just works. And everyone I know prefers N to A. Drivers proprietary. Result great. GPU responds well.

Well, I don't know why it didn't work out for you. But my AMD experience has improved fundamentally since the fglrx days, to the point where I prefer AMD over Nvidia. You said you don't know why people say that AMD has improved so much, but it definitely rings true for me.

I said "LLM lens" because you were talking about hardware typically used for number crunching, not graphics displays, like the MI300. So I was suggesting that the difference between what you hear online about the driver and your own experience might result from people like me mostly talking about the 2d / 3d acceleration side of things while the experience for ROCm and stuff is probably another story altogether.

I see. I see. I got tripped up by 'LLM' since I got the GPUs for diffusion models. Anyway, the whole thing sounds like the old days when I had Ubuntu Dapper Drake running flawlessly on my laptop and everyone was telling me Linux wasn't ready: it's an artifact of the hardware and some people have great support and others don't. Glad you do.

Google has previously delivered good Linux support on Arm Chromebooks and is expected to launch unified Android+ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2 Arm devices in 2026.

Isn't Google moving to Fuchsia?

I don't think these are mutually exclusive, they're just unifying ChromeOS and Android for now.

On bare metal or pKVM?

Fuchsia is dead sadly

It's very alive. It's being used for Google Nest hub devices. Through for HN that might as well it being dead, it seems.

“Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated”

Google folks pop up here and there and say it’s actively worked on. Unless you have more recent information, I believe the project is still alive.

I thought it was the opposite and that it would replace Linux for Google products

Citation needed? I don’t disbelieve you but I haven’t seen anything concrete.