I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.
No gaming - and I came in knowing full well that a lot of the mainstream programs don't play well with snapdragon.
What has amazed me the most is the battery life and the seemingly no real lag or micro-stuttering that you get in some other laptops.
So, in all, fine for light use. For anything serious, use a desktop.
Many people including myself do serious work on a macbook, which is also ARM. What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
Everything else around the cpu. apple systems are entirely co-designed (cpu to work with the rest of the components and everything together to work with mac os).
While i'd love to see macbook-level quality on other brands (looking at you, lenovo) tight hardware+software co-design (and co-development) yields much better results.
Unfortunately, even Intel is moving in that direction whenever they're trying to be "legacy free", but I wonder if that's also because they're trying to emulate the success of smartphone SoC vendors.
If anything, Linux powered devices are a good example on how all of them end up with OEM-name Linux, with minimal contributions to upstream.
If everyone would leave Windows in droves, expect regular people to be getting Dell and HP Linux at local PC store, with the same limitations as going outside their distros with binary blobs, and pre-installed stuff.
The legend of Windows on ARM is decades old, and people have been seriously trying to make it happen for at least the past two decades. They're all bled dry. Apple is the only one who can turn a profit, courtesy of their sweetheart deal with Masayoshi Son.
Depends why the Snapdragon chips were relevant in the first place! I got an ARM laptop for work so that I can locally build things for ARM that we want to be able to deploy to ARM servers.
(I'm keen about ARM and RISC-V systems, but I can never actually justify them given the spotty Linux situation and no actual use case)
Outside the embedded space, cross-compilation really is a fool's errand: either your software is not portable (which means it's not future-proof), or you are targeting an architecture that is not commercially viable.
My wife is very sensitive to glossy screens and we have big problems to find new laptop for her, as most good ones are glossy now.
I am so grateful to the Asahi Linux guys who made this whole thing work. What a tour de force! One day, we'll get the M4 Mac Mini on Asahi and that will be far superior to this Snapdragon X Elite anyway.
I remember working on a Qualcomm dev board over a decade ago and they had just the worst documentation. The hardware wouldn't even respond correctly to what you told it to do. I don't know if that's standard but without the large amount of desire there is to run Linux on Apple Silicon I didn't really anticipate support approaching what Asahi has on M1/M2.
"Linux on Snapdragon X Elite: Linaro and Tuxedo Pave the Way for ARM64 Laptops"
291 points, 217 comments
If you want to change some settings oft[sic] the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
Generally, they are far nicer than Qualcomm when it comes to supporting standard technology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938410
BTW. I don't think Qualcomm SoCs running Windows was just about performance but more of a time-limited exclusivity deal with MS.
For example I've had this dell Elitebook where I've installed Debian wiping out Win. While on windows system prompts Bios update practically every week but been years in Linux on same bios. IIRC updates were win only or jump thru some complex rings of fire. Haven't bothered looking up in a while..
I've also had to disable some protection such as security before I could install Debian though I guess there's a way if I research hard enough.
Google and Samsung managed to make very successful Chromebooks together, but IIRC there was a bunch of back and forth to make the whole thing boot quickly and sip battery power.
Only RISC-V is worth switching to.
Linux OTOH can only use the information it has from ACPI to accomplish things like CPU power states, etc. So you end up with issues like "the fans stop working after my laptop wakes from sleep" because of a broken ACPI implementation.
There are a couple of laptops with excellent battery life under linux though, and if you can find a lunar lake laptop with iGPU and IPS screen, you can idle around 3-4W and easily get 12+ hours of battery.
I have an LG Gram 15 from 2021 and it gets 15+ hours under light usage in Linux.
There's a saying in motorcycling: it's better to be alive than right. There's no upside in being correct if it leaves you worse off.
There are ways to make things better leveraging the Linux way. Make more usable tools for fixing ACPI deficiencies with hotloadable patches, ways of validating or verifying the patches for safety, ways of sharing and downloading them, and building a community around it.
Moaning that manufacturers only pay attention to where their profits come from is not a strategy at all.
It's extremely dependent on the hardware and driver quality. On ARM and contemporary x86 that's even more true, because (among other things) laptops suspend individual devices ("suspend-to-idle" or "S0ix" or "Modern Standby"), and any one device failing to suspend properly has a disproportionate impact.
That said, to a first approximation, this is a case where different people have wildly different experiences, and people who buy high-end well-supported hardware experience a completely different world than people who install Linux on whatever random hardware they have. For instance, Linux on a ThinkPad has excellent battery life, sometimes exceeding Windows.
If you have a dGPU, Linux implementation of the power management or offloading actually consumes more power than Windows due to bad architectural design. Here is a talk from XDC2025 that plans to fix some of the issues: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/425/
Desktop usage is a third class citizen under Linux (servers first, embedded a distant second). Phones have good battery life since SoC and ODM engineers spend months to tune them and they have first party proprietary drivers. None of the laptop ODMs do such work to support Linux. Even their Windows tooling is arcane.
Unless the users get drivers all the minute PMICs and sensors, you'll never get the battery life you can get from a clean Windows install with all the drivers. MS and especially OEMs shoot themselves in the foot by filling the base OS with so much bloat that Linux actually ends up looking better compared to stock OEM installs.
That's in an extremely vanilla Debian stable install, running in the default "Balanced" power mode, without any power-related tuning or configuration.
That compares reasonably well with my 14" M3 Macbook Pro, which seems to be drawing around 3.5 W with a similar set of apps open.
Sure, the XPS is flattered in this comparison because it has a slightly smaller screen, but even accounting for that it would still be... fine? Easily enough to get through a full day of use, which is all I care about.
There's nothing special about this XPS, and I'd expect the Thinkpad models that have explicit Linux support to be equally fine. The key point is that the vendor has put some amount of care and attention into producing a supportable system.
I personally never tested it, and I can't find definite benchmarks that confirm and measure the waste.
Think I'm arguing its both things where the OS itself can optimize things for battery life along with instilling awareness and API support for it so developers can consider it too.
This meant that by the time they started pushing devs to pay attention to QoS and such, good Mac apps had already been thoroughly multithreaded for years, making it relatively easy to toss things onto lower priority queues.
But that's just one problem, I bet.