Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

Linux support is still basically non-existent for the first gen, and they made all this deal about supporting Linux and the open source community. This is to say, don't trust them

The truth is much more subtle than "nonexistent" IMO [1].

Clearly it's a priority because the support for ChromeOS/android support is a big headline this year.

[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...

Also worth noting that not all the bits needing support are inside of the Snapdragon, so specific vendor support from Dell, Lenovo etc is required.

My (admittedly cynical) interpretation is that they are dropping support for desktop Linux completely and shipping Android drivers instead.

That'd definitely fit the Qualcom pattern of trying to force you to update by not upstreaming their linux drivers.

This is one place where windows has an advantage over linux. Window's longterm support for device drivers is generally really good. A driver written for Vista is likely to run on 11.

They “supported Linux” by putting it in a virtual machine guarded by the hardware against the machine’s owner. No thank you.

A stable driver ABI will do that. And a couple billion in revenue to fund bending over backwards to make sure stuff doesn't break.

Not surprising considering I haven't seen a programming manual or actual datasheet for these things in the first place. Usually helps if you tell the community how to interact with your hardware ..

I thought “Android drivers” were Linux drivers?

I think the situation is:

Old situation: "Android drivers" are technically Linux drivers in that they are drivers which are built for a specific, usually ancient, version of Linux with no effort to upstream, minimal effort to rebase against newer kernels, and such poor quality that there's a reason they're not upstreamed.

New situation: "Android drivers" are largely moved to userspace, which does have the benefit of allowing Google to give them a stable ABI so they might work against newer kernels with little to no porting effort. But now they're not really Linux drivers.

In neither case does it really help as much as you'd hope.

They expected linux devs to build it for free

How's the WSL2 support on these Aarch64 Windows systems?

I'm not a huge fan of working in WSL, because I actively dislike the Windows GUI.

Android drivers don't support Wayland etc.

That ended 10-20 years ago. The best you can hope for now is vendor-provided drivers.

I have both Ubuntu and Docker Desktop set up in WSL2 on my X Elite laptop, they both work great, no issues (at least none that I have run into).

Not even true: Arm, Intel, AMD, and most other hardware vendors (who are actively making an effort to support Linux on their parts) actually publish useful[^1] documentation.

edit: Also, not knocking the Qualcomm folks working on Linux here, just observing that the lack of hardware documentation doesn't exactly help reeling in contributors.

[^1]: Maybe in some cases not as useful as it could be when bringing up some OS on hardware, but certainly better than nothing

In some cases the linux devs want to build it for free, but they still need enough information to work with

Old Android also had a bunch of weird kernel drivers that were not upstream; they mostly are now so Android kernel is converging on Linux finally.