I have a gorgeous Surface Pro 11 X1 Elite that can run just enough Linux to tease me with how beautiful it could be, but it's still unstable enough that I can't daily it.
From the June 4th article: "These patches are a result of a collaboration between a couple of Qualcomm engineers taking part in an internal sprint and were created over 3 days."
They've been upstreaming drivers for the X2 platform for months at this point, since at least late 2025 (just search "glymur" or "kaanapali" on LKML).
The patch referenced in the Phoronix article is just a device tree file. That is the easiest part of the whole thing. As usual he's just farming every random LKML patch he can for clicks.
The open source world has a habit of leaving the easiest part of the whole thing unfinished for years or decades, so I salute this patch and I salute Phoronix for calling attention to it.
That's crazy, $4,586 for 32 GB RAM? Asus is selling an X2 Elite Extreme laptop with 48 GB RAM for $1,699.99 and it's in stock at Best Buy today. What is HP thinking?
Valve is just hedging against Microsoft having a big red button to kill Steam. They've built their kingdom on top of Microsoft, and Microsoft would love to have it for themselves I'm sure. It's in Valve's best interest to divorce themselves from Windows to protect themselves from Microsoft.
It happens to also benefit the Linux gaming crowd, but it's still ultimately self-interest driving the work. The engineers doing the work are probably doing it for the altruistic reasons, but ultimately Valve is writing the cheques.
Sure, but Qualcomm upstreaming their support to mainline would also have broad benefits for them and be a win-win.
Their C-suits & bean counters are seemingly just not getting that themselves nor having anyone that knows that high enough the hierachy...
What makes Valve great at the moment is that their business interest often aligns with ours (e.g. on the Linux support front). Which is great, don't get me wrong. But that's still beneficial for the company.
It's in Valve's interest to have their own OS and not rely on a rival's platform. Especially a rival that has proven many times they WILL abuse their power.
It seems that external displays are only supported on HDMI (e.g. Mac Mini) but DP Alt mode is still listed as WIP so I'd assume MacBook's with only USB-C (all of them?) can't support an external display.
apple silicon is virtualization capable and the UTM app (on the app store, but open source so you can build it too) wraps Apple's hypervisor framework, allows me to run on my macbook air (m2 earlier, recently updated to m5 just to get more memory) macos as well as arm versions of both fedora and arch, with plasma and gnome (and i've used hyprland etc to toy around).
it's important to set UTM to use Apple Silicon _virtualization_, because otherwise it uses QEMU and is thereby emulating. With Apple Silicon virtualization, having macos and arch and fedora all going at once is amazing.
Because at the time of my purchase I mistakenly believed that fan-less was a given for an ARM laptop; and that ARM laptops were a lot more supported than Apple products; some big names were using ARM linux and raving about it.
It's still is a great laptop and I recommend it for the hardware overall, but not fan-less indeed.
Never trust Qualcomm in the linux space. It only leads to frustration. Somehow I've had to learn this lesson more than once because I'm not the smartest ARM addict.
Imagine you wrote a WYSIWYG text editor, like Libre Office Writer. You have all sorts of functionality and an overall architecture which makes it sane to upkeep the project & have things work well together. Then someone else makes a custom font, but kind of does it their own way and with a different approach making it a one off from the way the rest of the fonts all work and are used in the program maybe using a custom font file format parser and different UI element even though you know it could have just used the normal, already maintained and planned out code paths.
You can of course merge anything with the right license if you so like, like that one off font code into your editor, but if it doesn't fit well into the overall project or meet the general quality standards of it then it's not practical to and can actually be worse than not including it. Upstreaming is about submitting something the maintainer can reasonably accept and maintain, not just about whether working code is available. GPL licensed code provides the latter, it's still up to someone (either the original company or some other interested person) to make it fit right first.
"Quality" is maybe overloaded. Upstream requires the code to meet their sense of taste, and some of that is about quality, and some of that is about undocumented design concepts. It's not hard to meet the quality bar. Meeting the design requirements is extremely hard.
Ofcourse they can. But which particular person will do it ?
The "upstream" people deal with their own drivers, subsystems or tasks which takes up their time - but if someone feels they want to take on this too, they'll do it (normally that doesn't happen - it's up to the original authors to take responsibility)
Linux tries to avoid special cases. That means that when someone shows up with a new driver that's either not something that fits into an existing category, or which sort of (but doesn't entirely) overlap with an existing driver, there's an extended set of design discussions about how to make this new driver fit into existing infrastructure in a way that's consistent with what's there and which also allows new things to exist.
That sounds great from a design perspective, but it can also lead to cases where people are attempting to design for utter unknowns - potential futures that may or may not exist, theoretical understandings of how hardware works, that kind of thing. It frequently prevents new drivers being merged without significant modification, and sometimes it results in a need to entirely rearchitect the relevant part of the kernel before the driver can even be considered (and also now you need to split that driver into three parts). Upstreaming is hard.
Ah yes, the qualcomm way. Rather than upstreaming things so it just works make a Qualcomm Linux, perhaps with NDA and laywer speak to sign off on to get access to anything at all, all to use their mediocre hardware.
Qualcomm you suck, upstream your drivers, make it open. Stop faffing about with closed proprietary junk. Somehow Intel, Tenstorrent, and AMD understand this but you don't. You aren't NVIDIA! Even if you were NVIDIA know that people absolutely despise that model.
I was just about to complain about being locked into one kernel version, being at the mercy of a single vendor, but you said it so much better than I would have :) Thanks.
We'll see. They purposely dropped all server/console support and now only offer a Debian desktop image, which seems crazy for an SBC. Not exactly a welcome mat:
> Other variants that were previously provided AS-IS are no longer provided. Interested users need to build those by themselves.
I've personally been wrestling with their broken I2C for a couple weeks.
Really want to love this board but lots of sharp edges at the moment. Hopefully Qualcomm keeps dedicating resources to improving things - I know it's hard work!
Qualcomm is not a good software steward. Every time I used something they had their hand in, it was abandoned rather sooner than later.
Eudora: bought, milked, killed. BREW: rotted. AllJoyn: dead. Toq/Mirasol: gone in two years. CodeAurora: shut down. And the $899 Snapdragon Dev Kit: shipped months late, then cancelled with support "paused indefinitely" while units were still in transit. Even Adreno drivers barely get updates after launch.
The silicon is great. But software at Qualcomm is a launch checkbox, not a commitment. At this point, "powered by Qualcomm" on a dev platform is a signal to stay away.
Eudora was the first email client I used in the 90s, I didn't know that qualcomm was responsible for it's disappearance. Looks like the source was released in its last breath[0]; i'm a bit surprised it hasn't been scooped up and maintained anywhere
And here I was hoping they'd decided to support Linux on the Snapdragon X2 chips.
I have a gorgeous Surface Pro 11 X1 Elite that can run just enough Linux to tease me with how beautiful it could be, but it's still unstable enough that I can't daily it.
Torture.
It's really that weak?
It's happening: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HP-EliteBook-X-G2q-Linux
From the June 4th article: "These patches are a result of a collaboration between a couple of Qualcomm engineers taking part in an internal sprint and were created over 3 days."
it's not giving me any warm and fuzzy.
They've been upstreaming drivers for the X2 platform for months at this point, since at least late 2025 (just search "glymur" or "kaanapali" on LKML).
The patch referenced in the Phoronix article is just a device tree file. That is the easiest part of the whole thing. As usual he's just farming every random LKML patch he can for clicks.
The open source world has a habit of leaving the easiest part of the whole thing unfinished for years or decades, so I salute this patch and I salute Phoronix for calling attention to it.
Point well taken.
I used to believe, but now it seems to me that AMD and Intel will match Snapdragon's efficiency on x86 before that stuff is stable.
holy hell.. the price tags...!
That's crazy, $4,586 for 32 GB RAM? Asus is selling an X2 Elite Extreme laptop with 48 GB RAM for $1,699.99 and it's in stock at Best Buy today. What is HP thinking?
At some point, RAM arbitrage will be profitable at small scale: buy a complete PC, rip the RAM out, dump the rest and resell online.
$4,300-$6,000+, wow you're not wrong. And that's just 32 or 64 GB of RAM.
Something has gone wrong at HP. They are also charging $7,000 for Strix Halo.
HP is nuts
HPE I've had very good luck with for HCI.
why on earth would anyone buy that shit if you can buy a macbook pro that literally looks and feels like art vs. a plastic windows laptop?
it used to be that Apple was the pricier option but I guess not anymore
someone who doesn't want apple experience? I really don't need "art" computer if I'm not able to do what I want on it.
The ability to run Linux properly would be worth about a $1000, if it was reality. But it isn't, so...
macos desktop aesthetics have regressed, they managed to screw the rounded corners and the colors are too much
macbook m series processor laptops have the camera notch and frankenturd look and feel
thinkpads feel better and the hinge opens all the way
The problem with MacBook is that they have a shit OS...
Of course a 1000$+ windows laptop is going to look and feel like a low end 300$ one /s
When will folks learn companies only support Linux or any other FOSS to the extent their own business goals?
None of them are on the game for the well being of the community or whatever.
Profits and lower R&D costs, that is all.
Wouldn't you say that Valve is an exception to that rule?
Valve is just hedging against Microsoft having a big red button to kill Steam. They've built their kingdom on top of Microsoft, and Microsoft would love to have it for themselves I'm sure. It's in Valve's best interest to divorce themselves from Windows to protect themselves from Microsoft.
It happens to also benefit the Linux gaming crowd, but it's still ultimately self-interest driving the work. The engineers doing the work are probably doing it for the altruistic reasons, but ultimately Valve is writing the cheques.
No, I think Valve prioritizing an open platform independent of Microsoft aligns with their business goals.
They’re doing it in a manner that has broad benefits, but it’s definitely a win-win situation.
Sure, but Qualcomm upstreaming their support to mainline would also have broad benefits for them and be a win-win. Their C-suits & bean counters are seemingly just not getting that themselves nor having anyone that knows that high enough the hierachy...
Qualcomm aims to sue and monopolize so no sharing is caring for them. They want control.
Not at all, they don't want to pay for Windows licenses, as seen there is very little incentive to actually support native Linux games.
Additionally they want to prevent losing Steam content to Windows Store or XBox PC App.
If they could get Windows source at zero cost, like the Netbook OEMs did in the early days, they would quickly forget about Linux.
Additionally, don't forget current Valve's management doesn't live forever like any of us, and who knows what will happen to Valve afterwards.
What makes Valve great at the moment is that their business interest often aligns with ours (e.g. on the Linux support front). Which is great, don't get me wrong. But that's still beneficial for the company.
It's in Valve's interest to have their own OS and not rely on a rival's platform. Especially a rival that has proven many times they WILL abuse their power.
But it benefits the community
I recently tried to get BSD/Linux to work on my omnibook X 14 and... it's been a journey!
Eventually I got it to work well with [1] and extracted firmware off github because I had wiped Windows and all partitions into oblivion.
I was looking for the bliss of fan-less linux with ARM. The joy! [2]
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-concept-snapdragon-x-e...
[2] the fans are ON permanently
If you want fanless arm linux machine, why not macbook m2 air + asahi linux ?
Asahi still doesn't support a lot of basic things like: external displays, Thunderbolt, hardware accelerated video decoding, 120hz refresh rate, etc.
It supported my 175hz monitor on a M1 Mini.
It supports external displays, just not on any port
I was going by Asahi's own support page: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/
It seems that external displays are only supported on HDMI (e.g. Mac Mini) but DP Alt mode is still listed as WIP so I'd assume MacBook's with only USB-C (all of them?) can't support an external display.
120Hz is supported, iirc.
apple silicon is virtualization capable and the UTM app (on the app store, but open source so you can build it too) wraps Apple's hypervisor framework, allows me to run on my macbook air (m2 earlier, recently updated to m5 just to get more memory) macos as well as arm versions of both fedora and arch, with plasma and gnome (and i've used hyprland etc to toy around).
it's important to set UTM to use Apple Silicon _virtualization_, because otherwise it uses QEMU and is thereby emulating. With Apple Silicon virtualization, having macos and arch and fedora all going at once is amazing.
pertinent references :
https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
or search for UTM on the Apple app store, where it's prebuilt (and that's what i use successfully).
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
Because at the time of my purchase I mistakenly believed that fan-less was a given for an ARM laptop; and that ARM laptops were a lot more supported than Apple products; some big names were using ARM linux and raving about it.
It's still is a great laptop and I recommend it for the hardware overall, but not fan-less indeed.
Asahi is like a decade away from being 100% tho
Nah they'd rather try to continue to force snapdragon on windows where no one actually cares about this and the experience is trash.
AArch64 is dead for Windows and client Linux, and the knife is in Qualcomm's hands.
Never trust Qualcomm in the linux space. It only leads to frustration. Somehow I've had to learn this lesson more than once because I'm not the smartest ARM addict.
It is sad to see that they still do not support Snapdragon products with Linux offically as a product
Just upstream your drivers! Then you don't need Qualcomm Linux.... you just have Linux.
Why can’t upstream just take their drivers? Isn’t that the point of requiring those drivers to be GPL?
Imagine you wrote a WYSIWYG text editor, like Libre Office Writer. You have all sorts of functionality and an overall architecture which makes it sane to upkeep the project & have things work well together. Then someone else makes a custom font, but kind of does it their own way and with a different approach making it a one off from the way the rest of the fonts all work and are used in the program maybe using a custom font file format parser and different UI element even though you know it could have just used the normal, already maintained and planned out code paths.
You can of course merge anything with the right license if you so like, like that one off font code into your editor, but if it doesn't fit well into the overall project or meet the general quality standards of it then it's not practical to and can actually be worse than not including it. Upstreaming is about submitting something the maintainer can reasonably accept and maintain, not just about whether working code is available. GPL licensed code provides the latter, it's still up to someone (either the original company or some other interested person) to make it fit right first.
Upstream requires a level of quality most developers cannot meet.
"Quality" is maybe overloaded. Upstream requires the code to meet their sense of taste, and some of that is about quality, and some of that is about undocumented design concepts. It's not hard to meet the quality bar. Meeting the design requirements is extremely hard.
Perhaps "maintainability" is a more suitable term?
Ofcourse they can. But which particular person will do it ?
The "upstream" people deal with their own drivers, subsystems or tasks which takes up their time - but if someone feels they want to take on this too, they'll do it (normally that doesn't happen - it's up to the original authors to take responsibility)
Linux tries to avoid special cases. That means that when someone shows up with a new driver that's either not something that fits into an existing category, or which sort of (but doesn't entirely) overlap with an existing driver, there's an extended set of design discussions about how to make this new driver fit into existing infrastructure in a way that's consistent with what's there and which also allows new things to exist.
That sounds great from a design perspective, but it can also lead to cases where people are attempting to design for utter unknowns - potential futures that may or may not exist, theoretical understandings of how hardware works, that kind of thing. It frequently prevents new drivers being merged without significant modification, and sometimes it results in a need to entirely rearchitect the relevant part of the kernel before the driver can even be considered (and also now you need to split that driver into three parts). Upstreaming is hard.
for real
The quality of the qcom code is way too low for upstream
Ah yes, the qualcomm way. Rather than upstreaming things so it just works make a Qualcomm Linux, perhaps with NDA and laywer speak to sign off on to get access to anything at all, all to use their mediocre hardware.
Qualcomm you suck, upstream your drivers, make it open. Stop faffing about with closed proprietary junk. Somehow Intel, Tenstorrent, and AMD understand this but you don't. You aren't NVIDIA! Even if you were NVIDIA know that people absolutely despise that model.
I was just about to complain about being locked into one kernel version, being at the mercy of a single vendor, but you said it so much better than I would have :) Thanks.
Recently bought an SBC with a QCS6490 (https://radxa.com/products/dragon/q6a/). Curious to see if the vendor winds up using this as a base.
We'll see. They purposely dropped all server/console support and now only offer a Debian desktop image, which seems crazy for an SBC. Not exactly a welcome mat:
> Other variants that were previously provided AS-IS are no longer provided. Interested users need to build those by themselves.
https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-dragon-q6a
AI / NPU use cases have been severely hampered as well:
https://gist.github.com/Foadsf/3cc2e0ed357c3ac7180589701bf83...
I've personally been wrestling with their broken I2C for a couple weeks.
Really want to love this board but lots of sharp edges at the moment. Hopefully Qualcomm keeps dedicating resources to improving things - I know it's hard work!
MNT just started offering the QCS6490 for their laptops.
https://mnt.re/media/reform_md/2026-06-30-june-update.html
Recently, Qualcomm acquired Modular/Mojolang/Chris Lattner et. al..
Yocto sounds like it makes me feel when I use it
Sure, it's not great, it's just better (for some tasks) then every tool it's competing with. Buildroot is simpler, but not as flexible, etc...
Qualcomm are forever blacklisted in my environment, because of their fuckery with backdoors for the spook agencies which fund their research.
I will definitely not be touching their Linux variant for that reason. I simply don't trust the company, one bit. They are the American Huawei.
Qualcomm is not a good software steward. Every time I used something they had their hand in, it was abandoned rather sooner than later.
Eudora: bought, milked, killed. BREW: rotted. AllJoyn: dead. Toq/Mirasol: gone in two years. CodeAurora: shut down. And the $899 Snapdragon Dev Kit: shipped months late, then cancelled with support "paused indefinitely" while units were still in transit. Even Adreno drivers barely get updates after launch.
The silicon is great. But software at Qualcomm is a launch checkbox, not a commitment. At this point, "powered by Qualcomm" on a dev platform is a signal to stay away.
Eudora was the first email client I used in the 90s, I didn't know that qualcomm was responsible for it's disappearance. Looks like the source was released in its last breath[0]; i'm a bit surprised it hasn't been scooped up and maintained anywhere
[0] https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...
It has now been decades since I used Eudora. I still feel I lost the best email client due to Qualcomm’s neglect