Linux Comes To Snapdragon X Elite Laptops Courtesy Of Linaro And Tuxedo
Snapdragon X laptops currently have a relatively small market share, but they're gaining at a decent clip with quarterly figures rising. Not everyone is a fan of Windows, though. With that in mind, the folks at Linaro and Tuxedo Computers have joined forces to create a laptop that's running a full ARM64 Linux distribution out of the box, with all the hardware working and as little user friction as possible. At a recent convention, the companies proudly displayed their prototype Snapdragon Elite X laptop with a bespoke build of Linux running native ARM64 software.
The machine wasn't merely booting to a terminal window. It was actually running standard PC games in the FEX-EMU emulator, using an external USB-C monitor, keyboard and mouse, all while the rest of the OS ran smoothly on the laptop's main display for web browsing and other daily tasks. It's quite the achievement considering it's an entirely distinct system architecture from the standard Intel/AMD x86-64 ecosystem. Nascent efforts like these usually take their sweet time to produce visible results, but the prototype on display is progressing quite well.
Things didn't get to this point by accident, though. Linaro quotes Qualcomm, laptop vendors like Lenovo, Dell, Asus, and HP, and the Linux community for the collective effort. Naturally, Tuxedo Computers also gets kudos for providing Linaro with two high-specced machines for development and testing. Linaro's objective is that common distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora can run on Arm machines without additional effort, and points out some examples: the Linux kernel 6.15 already supports multiple Snapdragon laptops from various vendors, and Canonical has a Concept Distro of Ubuntu 24.10 available and is is adding native ARM64 support to Ubuntu 25.04, alongside Fedora Linux. Given the way Windows is going lately, we suspect many users will be happy to see alternatives pop up.
