For the past 18 months, the Linux OEM Tuxedo Computers has been working on bringing a Snapdragon X Elite ARM laptop to market, but now they cancelled the project due to complications.
Development turned out to be challenging due to the different architecture, and in the end, the first-generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected. In particular, the long battery runtimes—usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices—were not achieved under Linux. A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control. Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates. Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support.
Given these conditions, investing several more months of development time does not seem sensible, as it is not foreseeable that all the features you can rightfully expect would be available in the end. In addition, we would be offering you a device with what would then be a more than two-year-old Snapdragon X Elite (X1E), whose successor, the Snapdragon X2 Elite (X2E), was officially introduced in September 2025 and is expected to become available in the first half of 2026.
↫ Tuxedo’s announcement
Back when Qualcomm was hyping up these processors, the company made big claims about supporting Linux equally to Windows, but those promises have turned out to be absolutely worthless. Tuxedo already highlighted the problems it was dealing with half a year ago, and now it seems these problems have become impossible to overcome – at least for now. This is a shame, bu also not entirely unexpected, since there’s no way a small Linux OEM can do the work that Qualcomm promised it would do for its own chip.
All this sadly means we still don’t really have proper Linux support for modern ARM laptops, which is a crying shame. The problem isn’t so much Linux itself, but the non-standardised world of ARM hardware. Large OEMs are willing to do the work to make Windows work, but despite recent successes, desktop Linux is nowhere near as popular as Windows, so there’s little incentive for OEMs (or Qualcomm) to step up their game.
It is what it is.
Notably, the reasons given by Tuxedo are that they just did not like the hardware in the end. The number one reason they cited was battery life.
I think the main reason though was just that they took too long. With the X2 Elite chips already coming out, it is just too late to release an X1E based laptop.
Qaulcomm is not going to be any easier to work with but they are already pushing support for the X2 chips into the Linux mainline kernel:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-X2-Elite-GPU-Linux-619
At this point though, I am kind of hoping that ARM laptops continue to flounder as I would prefer that we move directly to RISC-V instead. The Tenstorrent Ascalon is going to completely change the game for RISC-V and could be a laptop chip but realistically, it is still a few years yet before we have commercially successful RISC-V laptops.
But where we are today with ARM seems to be a matter of opinion. This Reddit post is from months ago:
“I decided to try installing Ubuntu on my thinkpad t14s snapdragon today despite the internet telling me how bad the Linux support is and well.. most things just worked out of the box so I’m a little confused. And let me tell you, Linux on these snapdragon thinkpads is a beautiful combo. All day battery life and almost no heat / fan noise. This feels too good to be true.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1m69945/linux_on_arm_t14s_snapdragon/
The problem is that Risc-V doesnt solve the big problems that these chips have for support. They still rely upon individually made device trees, have a bad/inextensible booting system, often rely upon not the greatest supported GPUs or other inbuild hardware that means that it has to run a custom distro and not just a mainline built Fedora or Arch. I also see no particular evidence that the power situation would be better with them either
@Shugo
The decision to use device trees or not has nothing to do with the ISA.
The RISC-V MilkV Titan board has UEFI and ACPI:
https://milkv.io/titan
The StarFive Vision2 uses UEFI and even has a TianoCore open firmware:
https://forum.rvspace.org/t/unlocking-new-possibilities-starfive-visionfive-2-sbc-now-supports-tianocore-edk-ii-uefi/2779
For server class stuff, groups like Red Hat are pushing very hard for UEFI, ACPI, and RVA23. Ubuntu is drawing similar line in the sand. So, I fully expect these to be the norm there. For SBC stuff, device trees will probably stick around. But who knows.
Power is also not really driven by the ISA. For micro-controllers, RISC-V often beats ARM for power efficiency. When the desktop / server class RISC-V chips like Ascalon arrive next year, I do not expect them to lead on power consumption right away. But we will see.
To clarify my comment though, my point was not that RISC-V is technically better in any way other than being open. My point is simply that my personal preference is for RISC-V to be successful sooner and, the more niches ARM fills, the harder that will be. At this point, I would like RISC-V to arrive in the laptop space before ARM gains wide acceptance for that use case.
I don’t agree. While I would like to have RISC-V systems ubiquitous illwishing to ARM right now on just a promise that RISC-V “will be great” soon-ish would simply stifle all development…
I much prefer to have more ARM based devices with good Linux support now (I’m on mac M1 right now and would love to jump to Linux with similar performance and device not serving as a heater for the whole room). What’s more, with ARM being more popular and having to support multiple architectures/builds it would be way easier to include RISC-V one as well in the future…
@wojtek
Is Asahi Linux on M1 not good enough for you today? It seems like they have mostly “got there” for M1 (certainly not for M3 and beyond though). M1 Apple Silicon seems better supported than Qualcomm X Elite laptops.
Linux on both ARM and RISC-V is already pretty developed in terms of software with most Linux distro packages working and several distros supporting them. The biggest issues today are around device support and the kinds of things that @Shugo is raising.
For RISC-V, another issue is that, to this point, each chip has supported different capabilities forcing software providers to build to a lowest common denominator that maybe did not fully utilize your hardware. With the RVA23 profile ratified, hardware appearing from this point forward wil be comparable in features to ARM9 and x86-64v4. Distros like Red Hat and Ubuntu are assuming that baseline. Pre-compiled software will work out of the box, including advanced features like vectorized code and hypervisors.
RISC-V will not really be “ready” until sometime next year when actual Ascalon silicon starts to ship. ARM still has some time to get off the ground.
LeFantome,
For the laptop it is the entire SoC that is the limit. You have the CPU, but you also need highly efficient GPU, and proper fast RAM, and everything else that glues them together.
I can also see why ARM being so much fragmented made this worse. Companies like Samsung will not share their efficiency improvements in the Linux drivers and everyone has to reinvent the wheel. (Not to mention firmware, but that was already given as closed).
You every vendor basically has to start from scratch and it becomes a very competitive arena, while PC was somehow more cooperative (even during cutthroat competition).
RISC-V? Their answers to these are yet to be seen? (Are there good SoC drivers in Linux kernel)?
(Ah… if you described “device trees” and 1000 forks for each android device to a Linux enthusiast in 1990s, he would go crazy)
@sukru
For ARM laptops, the issues have not been the SoC. They are things like speakers, USB, and fingerprint readers. I do think that desktop and server use cases require things like UEFI and ACPI. From what I am seeing, I expect to see those come on the RISC-V side.
For SoCs, we may see that trickle down but it is less certain. I expect device trees to stay common there. There are SoC drivers in the Linux but it very much depends on the source. Both ARM and RISC-V SBC boards are a mixed bag.
For SBC devices, things like GPU are mixed again with vendors like Imagination Technology.
For desktops, laptops, and servers, we will probably see the same GPU suppliers that we do for x86-64. NVIDIA announced CUDA support for RISC-V recently. Certainly there is nothing unique about the RAM.
LeFantome,
Yes, and without ACPI and the related technologies like IO-MMU modern graphics cards would be a challenge to say the least on these devices. Yes, there are some RISC-V boards with PCI-e slots. But getting a standard Amd or nvidia card … is not “plug and play” yet (I remember reading some partial success on reddit a while ago. I’ll be honest, I have not followed the latest)
As long as there are open platforms, of course they will be supported. But I’m not sure the current vendors are moving in that direction. At least not yet.
As for RAM, did you mean BAR?
===
As for laptops, yes SoC is only part of the pain.
from https://app.daily.dev/posts/the-laptop-that-wasn-t-tuxedo-computers-shelves-linux-arm-notebook-plans-lap93yqk7, which mirrors the same thing.
RISC-V has an even worse fragmentation and non-standardization of platform issue than ARM.
For all its warts, one thing that the X86 ecosystem got it right was to make a somewhat universal platform at both HW and ABI levels.
ARM mostly has focused on the ABI standardization, leaving the HW platform open.
RISC-V takes that even further, by neither having ABI nor HW platform standardization.
Based on how well supported the Raapberry Pi I expected both Apple Silicon (despite Apple not really caring) and Windows ARM laptops to develop really good linux support, but I’ve been sorely dissapointed.
Again, slightly strange give. how well other ARM plattforms have been supported on Linux.