Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series

aaaronday about 2 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on qualcomm.com

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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

cromka•27 minutes ago

Qualcomm hired some developers back from Linaria and they have been providing support for a bunch of X2 laptops these past two, three months directly via Linux ARM MSM mailing list. I'm surprised it took them this long to announce this publicly.

Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.

d2kx•41 minutes ago

https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-coming-soon-to-qualcomm-sn...

timpera•33 minutes ago

The Snapdragon X chips are already wonderful with Windows 11 ARM64, so I'm pretty excited to see how much Linux will be able to squeeze out of those!

drnick1•about 1 hour ago

Sounds good, as long as a standard Linux distro can replace whatever operating system ships with these machines.

flakiness•38 minutes ago

If the upstream is properly done (that is a big if), this can be a go-to choice for the Linux laptop because it has much smaller config variations compared to Intel-based laptops: Everything from wifi (and even modem?), to audio, to camera ISP is included in the single SoC. If it works it works.

jordand•32 minutes ago

People have had a lot of issues with drivers and locked-down firmware on Snapdragon devices, so even with official Linux support for the chipset, the devices themselves could still be a nightmare to get working.

imglorp•35 minutes ago

Aren't all the Android Snapdragon phones already mostly there?

baby_souffle•42 minutes ago

Didn't they say something similar about the first ones?

Consider me cautiously optimistic.

jordand•36 minutes ago

Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices. I bought a surprisingly capable Lenovo mini PC with a Snapdragon X at a massive discount and it's stuck on Windows 11 for now.

Havoc•about 1 hour ago

Looks like they're learning!

yesbut•about 1 hour ago

https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2026/09/announcing-l...

kevincox•38 minutes ago

Thanks. This link has more detail about Linux support. I submitted it separately for discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824189

wslh•about 1 hour ago

Funny how Qualcomm is juggling three OSes to sell these chips while Apple just stuck a phone chip in the Neo and called it a day. Controlling the chip, the OS, and the actual computer is a huge advantage. Apple is more than one study case on competitive analysis.

cherryteastain•about 1 hour ago

This is entirely Qualcomm's doing. If they supported Arm SBSA/UEFI+ACPI like some other Arm chip companies (e.g. Ampere) you could boot a generic Linux (or indeed BSD) Arm distro on their chips no problem. Controlling the entire platform is not necessary, just follow the standards.

cromka•24 minutes ago

AFAIk this has nothing to do with Qualcomm but with vendors and Microsoft.

MrDrMcCoy•about 1 hour ago

All they have to do is support Windows and get their stuff upstreamed in the Linux kernel, no need for specific distro support. I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.

PorciiVorbesc•34 minutes ago

>I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings

So that if you want to use the next distro release you will be forced to buy their next-gen chip because that's the only supported one on that distro. D'uh.

bigyabai•about 1 hour ago

What advantage? I'm always a bit shocked to see people say this without qualifying it at all.

On the contrary, Apple has to do a lot of greenfield work by refusing standards like UEFI, Vulkan and normal filesystems. They end up reinventing the wheel just to support the same featureset that Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and Intel all generally planned for.

wmf•43 minutes ago

Is it more work to support a completely proprietary boot path or three different "standard" boot paths?

jauntywundrkind•about 1 hour ago

Yay!

Please sell >1 model of computer with X2 EE (elite extreme) please please please. Not that #1 was bad at all but more please! https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-A16-Laptop-Review...

I really hope it's like 2031 and we're swimming in way too many of these. Running great Linux. How sick would that be. (And X4 is running mainline great too).

FlowingRiver•about 1 hour ago

While I am somewhat negative on ARM/RISCV systems due to there being like 50 different boot systems and ASIC setups, I am cautiously optimistic that something like the A16 will end up unintentionally becoming sort of a standard via a large amount being sold.

I suspect in the next 5 years something like this will come up.

wmf•about 1 hour ago

Ironically that's being fixed by Microsoft forcing UEFI.

MomsAVoxell•44 minutes ago

Unironically, the serious reason I don't want to embrace Snapdragon, is because: Qualcomm.

jojobas•13 minutes ago

Lenovo has one (it's a Yoga, not a Thinkpad though).

dsr_•about 1 hour ago

Three cookie banners. I bet the announcement is slop that doesn't even answer relevant questions.

thehamkercat•about 1 hour ago

Weird, I only see one, even with ublock origin disabled.