I'm personally rooting for "business decision" over "turning over a new leaf".

If FOSS support is motivated by a clear profit motive, then it'll be viewed positively by shareholders and stick around no matter who is in charge. If FOSS support comes from "turning over a new leaf", it could be dropped at a moment's notice in response to a leadership change.

IMO we will always see far better FOSS support from the private sector when the time they invest has a positive ROI that is obvious and easy to brag about in a quarterly earnings call.

Snapdragon does poorly I think because it's a bet if it works or not. Windows runs things seamlessly other than OpenGL (it can run that too but it's not anything strait forward - needs the gl to dx store app thing) but the other reason is cost. for the premium business laptop most buyers (business) won't budge off Intel even because of the "no one got fired for buying IBM" mentality at the big Enterprises Ive been at.

I will say with my 8 gen 3 snapdragon I'm impressed and also disappointed - stupid thing needs active cooling and I'm pretty sure it's bad enough that it's desoldered or damaged the core or something from heat but also you can't get driver updates for the GPU if you wanted because Qualcomm be the way it do.

Of course it's a "business decision". Companies don't do things for any other reason. They see a benefit to upstreaming in this instance, and will do it again (or not) depending on whether or not they expect to see benefits in the future.

This is no different from any other company that has "embraced" open source.

> Their Snapdragon X laptop didn't do very well, and they likely realize an ARM Windows laptop will always be a second class citizen

Why? So far ARM laptops provide either vastly better battery life for the same performance or vastly better performance for the same battery life. Even versus discrete GPUs.

Within a couple years from now you're gonna look like an utter fool for buying x86 (and Nvidia / AMD / Intel GPU) unless Intel, AMD and Nvidia really pull their head out of the sand.

There's a few specific workloads like local LLM and legacy where you'd want a discrete GPU or x86, but otherwise it is looking like GG.

It'll probably be as much of a second class citizen elsewhere (the real problem is the hardware hasn't as good as Apple Silicon laptops but has been in the same price class at the bottom) but it's good they chase everywhere rather than just one use case.

I'd imagine it's purely because not doing it turned out to be PITA in the long term.

As with pretty much all other ARM cpu vendors that pushed for their own kernel fork just to have drivers that did not need to be okayed by mainstream kernel, it was faster iteration to deliver something working to their clients; but it was also PITA to their clients, especially when industry started demanding longer support for their devices

A businesss decision would be great. What would suck would be a marketing decision.

Get a DGX spark.

Ships with aarch64 Ubuntu 24.04.

Tons of cores and RAM.

Very quiet and small

UEFI bootloader - I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and ESXi arm edition just by booting the ISO

usb-c power input (kinda cool)

Insane connectx 200GbE RoCE networking

10GbE Ethernet

Oh and an nvidia gpu with cuda and access to 128GB of unified memory

It would be perfect if it had some kind of BMC or IPMI/redfish and an exposed PCIE slot. But this thing is an awesome arm64 workstation no doubt.

May try to install to a USB drive and hang another gpu off the nvme port just to see what happens

Does this actually translate into any kind of probability of a manufacturer making a device with this chip?

I don't think this changes the game as much as you think.

AFAIU, the biggest challenge of running Linux on ARM machines is supporting the devicetree of each machine. After all, there is mainline kernel support for previous Qualcomm chips, yet very few machines with those chips can actually run Linux distros.

So this is good news, but in practical terms it's just a marketing piece.

How is Asahi not native?

My impression from the emulation folks is that the proprietary drivers are chock full of problems. I suspect it was open source drivers or nothing (i.e., back to an AMD x86 solution like the Steam Deck).

(And I don't think Qualcomm has seen the light - my understanding is that the Turnip drivers are purely reverse engineered.)

They've been working on better mainline Linux support for a while now, but their last generation is still catching up on the driver side of things.

I hope they succeed but the last generation has only recently become mostly usable for specific distros. General support may take a while.

I just checked: Frame is Gen 3 and the article is Gen 5.

It wouldn't surprise me if they're full of binary blobs

> When you get new hardware and new features, you don’t want them sitting idle while you wait for patches to get upstreamed. Whether you develop for IoT, automotive, audio or mobile, when you get new features in a system-on-chip (SoC), you want to take advantage of them right now.

Sure doesn’t sound like mainstream consumer pc desktop is the target at all. Yes, they do provide instructions for how to run this on desktop but it’s far from accessible for the overwhelming majority of pc users.

I mean it’s still a good thing for Linux desktop to have this as an option, I’m not complaining. But to be realistic those benefits feel tangential to what Qualcomm is aiming at here.

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/how-well-does-w...

Apparently WSL2 does work, it pulls a native ARM64 Linux distro and then proceeds as usual.

I have the 8 gen 3 and wsl and hyperv work fine just can't really use x86 binaries / containers / operating systems.

The Linux support on the X1E today is lacking. I’m much more optimistic for the X2E.

The hardware is great, though, I love the 12” Surface with the X1E. WSL2 works great!

I really hope this is the case because I’d love to have an arm64 laptop for work. Then binaries in my laptop will work on my embedded systems, generally.

> As far as I know, there currently are no options for lightweight tablets that support Linux.

Does this count? https://puri.sm/products/librem-11

yeah i had to inspect element and delete the html node. theres a double-space in the first line of the top summary section.

presentation is half the message!

I worked at Linaro, who was contracting for Qualcomm. Qualcomm were pushing for some protected hypervisor called Gunyah (which had its own Linux interface and needed a new qemu port) that apparently no one liked. I tried to port it to KVM [1], but upstream folks (mostly Google) outright rejected the port. Otherwise KVM would have been available on QCOM boards. You can still try it. I have a Linux kernel and a Qemu port on my github [2,3]

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20250424141341.841734-1-karim.ma...

[2] https://github.com/karim-manaouil/linux-next/tree/gunyah-kvm

[3] https://github.com/karim-manaouil/qemu-for-gunyah

MS Windows had an exclusive period for X1, but Google will support Android and ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2-based devices in 2026, which would require the pKVM/KVM hypervisor used by Android, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167

The original Oryon systems allowed you to boot directly into EL2 and skip Gunyah via BIOS settings. I assume this will be the same.

i'm using Linux just fine on an ARM desktop for a long time, via Apple Silicon hypervisor enabled via the UTM macos app (which wraps both Qemu, which i don't use, and Apple Silicon hypervisor, which i do use, configurable when instantiating a new image from an iso).

i mention this because perhaps you'd like it too. in my case fedora 43 works just fine, and fast.

the year of linux desktop is called steamdeck

tbh I don't mind it so much on corporate blogs, it mainly grinds my gears when people choose to do it in (what would otherwise be) more personal writing.

The Qualcomm marketing spec sheet mentions AV1 decoding: https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...

Maybe that part of the driver isn't finished yet?

Oryon v3 is designed for actual PC usage, not phones. But they aren't shipping until H1 next year. This is just a heads-up memo about Linux support, in that regard. Which is nice, I guess?

The Lenovo x13s works pretty nicely these days, EL2 support aside. What problems have you faced?

I'd say collateral damage. Blame the guy who makes war.

You do realize that your country has has been fighting a very aggressive war, often intentionally targeting civilian targets like hospitals, high-rise residential areas and the power grid, and that because of that your country has been sanctioned by a large part of the world... Right?

I tried to get it on archive.is but it say in a loop forever.

Even when it's not blocked, the layout is broken...

Cancer is you and your country