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