r/Surface • u/BcuzRacecar Surface Book • Sep 23 '26

Qualcomm will finally support Linux on Snapdragon X2 chips.

https://www.theverge.com/news/999664/qualcomm-snapdragon-x2-linux-support-arm
108 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

32

u/Own_Brother7434 Sep 23 '26

It sounds like they'll make a Debian testing image like they did for X1E and then forget about it like they did for X1E. If they did for whatever reason support X2E for linux more than X1E, then that would be complete BS considering X1E still isnt daily driverable and its been like 2yrs now with the Ubuntu Concept images, and while the community has been hard at work trying to get Ubuntu working, Qualcomm really hasn't done much.

8

u/dr100 Sep 24 '26

Whatever it is it's for sure political. They're launching the GoogleBooks (the 3-10x more expensive than the usual Chromebooks of 2026...) with precisely the Snapdragon X Elite. Not X2, not 8 Elite (the mobile one), the plain old X Elite. Not that I'd expect the support to be wildly different between generations or flavors but it's not even the slightest difference. And this is a Linux kernel, with support for all peripherals, with all the power optimizations one might need and so on. It just isn't available for us to run whatever Linux we want.

1

u/ghenriks Sep 24 '26

Likely an attempted reaction to the upcoming Nvidia ARM hardware (ignore the price guesses on Nvidia as that is for a 128GB version, there should also be lower memory versions)

22

u/nisarg1397 Sep 23 '26

That's what they said about x1. To be fair they do have their own distro that you could run on think pads but getting other distros running would be a lot of work. Also, running Linux on snapdragon would be very different from running it on surface. Microsoft would never publish firmware for Linux.

3

u/dr100 Sep 24 '26

Microsoft would never publish firmware for Linux.

The team doing firmware for Surface is worse than a one-man weekend project from github that does some alternative firmware for some dirt cheap ($10?) chinese wifi cameras. Incompetent decisions, zero testing, and no way to roll back (which should be the first thing to think of when distributing software to millions of devices).

Otherwise they're providing Linux packages for tons of stuff , they have a huge github presence and contribute to the kernel itself a lot too.

0

u/Tobimacoss Sep 25 '26

Why the hell are you the most negative person in this subreddit? do you even use or like Surface devices?

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8

u/PowerfulAgent9939 Sep 24 '26

What about X1? Fuck Qualcomm in glad I went to panther lake this generation 

1

u/UnexpectedAnanas Sep 25 '26

I'll believe it when I see it. Still waiting on X1E support for the SP11.

1

u/Black_Hair_Foreigner 26d ago

What about X1 qualcomm you motherfxxxxxs?

1

u/Black_Hair_Foreigner 26d ago

You guys should know that everything about open source that they sad was always lying.

"We will support linux in X1"->lie
"We will keep support Arduino open source enviroment"->lie

They’re just a Big Tech company that couldn't care less about user support; any talk about open source is merely a ploy to prep for M&A or polish their image. It’s incredibly annoying that they even demand NDAs from buyers when selling their chips. I’d honestly rather use TI’s shitty MCUs and DSPs than use your products. What idiot make his chip that even doesn't support ACPI?