And here I was hoping they'd decided to support Linux on the Snapdragon X2 chips.
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I have a gorgeous Surface Pro 11 X1 Elite that can run just enough Linux to tease me with how beautiful it could be, but it's still unstable enough that I can't daily it.
Torture.
It's really that weak?
It's happening: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HP-EliteBook-X-G2q-Linux
From the June 4th article: "These patches are a result of a collaboration between a couple of Qualcomm engineers taking part in an internal sprint and were created over 3 days."
it's not giving me any warm and fuzzy.
They've been upstreaming drivers for the X2 platform for months at this point, since at least late 2025 (just search "glymur" or "kaanapali" on LKML).
The patch referenced in the Phoronix article is just a device tree file. That is the easiest part of the whole thing. As usual he's just farming every random LKML patch he can for clicks.
The open source world has a habit of leaving the easiest part of the whole thing unfinished for years or decades, so I salute this patch and I salute Phoronix for calling attention to it.
Point well taken.
I used to believe, but now it seems to me that AMD and Intel will match Snapdragon's efficiency on x86 before that stuff is stable.
holy hell.. the price tags...!
That's crazy, $4,586 for 32 GB RAM? Asus is selling an X2 Elite Extreme laptop with 48 GB RAM for $1,699.99 and it's in stock at Best Buy today. What is HP thinking?
At some point, RAM arbitrage will be profitable at small scale: buy a complete PC, rip the RAM out, dump the rest and resell online.
$4,300-$6,000+, wow you're not wrong. And that's just 32 or 64 GB of RAM.
Something has gone wrong at HP. They are also charging $7,000 for Strix Halo.
HP is nuts
HPE I've had very good luck with for HCI.
why on earth would anyone buy that shit if you can buy a macbook pro that literally looks and feels like art vs. a plastic windows laptop?
it used to be that Apple was the pricier option but I guess not anymore
someone who doesn't want apple experience? I really don't need "art" computer if I'm not able to do what I want on it.
The ability to run Linux properly would be worth about a $1000, if it was reality. But it isn't, so...
macos desktop aesthetics have regressed, they managed to screw the rounded corners and the colors are too much
macbook m series processor laptops have the camera notch and frankenturd look and feel
thinkpads feel better and the hinge opens all the way
The problem with MacBook is that they have a shit OS...
Of course a 1000$+ windows laptop is going to look and feel like a low end 300$ one /s
When will folks learn companies only support Linux or any other FOSS to the extent their own business goals?
None of them are on the game for the well being of the community or whatever.
Profits and lower R&D costs, that is all.
Wouldn't you say that Valve is an exception to that rule?
Valve is just hedging against Microsoft having a big red button to kill Steam. They've built their kingdom on top of Microsoft, and Microsoft would love to have it for themselves I'm sure. It's in Valve's best interest to divorce themselves from Windows to protect themselves from Microsoft.
It happens to also benefit the Linux gaming crowd, but it's still ultimately self-interest driving the work. The engineers doing the work are probably doing it for the altruistic reasons, but ultimately Valve is writing the cheques.
No, I think Valve prioritizing an open platform independent of Microsoft aligns with their business goals.
They’re doing it in a manner that has broad benefits, but it’s definitely a win-win situation.
Sure, but Qualcomm upstreaming their support to mainline would also have broad benefits for them and be a win-win.
Their C-suits & bean counters are seemingly just not getting that themselves nor having anyone that knows that high enough the hierachy...
Qualcomm aims to sue and monopolize so no sharing is caring for them. They want control.
Not at all, they don't want to pay for Windows licenses, as seen there is very little incentive to actually support native Linux games.
Additionally they want to prevent losing Steam content to Windows Store or XBox PC App.
If they could get Windows source at zero cost, like the Netbook OEMs did in the early days, they would quickly forget about Linux.
Additionally, don't forget current Valve's management doesn't live forever like any of us, and who knows what will happen to Valve afterwards.
What makes Valve great at the moment is that their business interest often aligns with ours (e.g. on the Linux support front). Which is great, don't get me wrong. But that's still beneficial for the company.
It's in Valve's interest to have their own OS and not rely on a rival's platform. Especially a rival that has proven many times they WILL abuse their power.
But it benefits the community
I recently tried to get BSD/Linux to work on my omnibook X 14 and... it's been a journey!
Eventually I got it to work well with [1] and extracted firmware off github because I had wiped Windows and all partitions into oblivion.
I was looking for the bliss of fan-less linux with ARM. The joy! [2]
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-concept-snapdragon-x-e...
[2] the fans are ON permanently
If you want fanless arm linux machine, why not macbook m2 air + asahi linux ?
Asahi still doesn't support a lot of basic things like: external displays, Thunderbolt, hardware accelerated video decoding, 120hz refresh rate, etc.
It supports external displays, just not on any port
I was going by Asahi's own support page: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/
It seems that external displays are only supported on HDMI (e.g. Mac Mini) but DP Alt mode is still listed as WIP so I'd assume MacBook's with only USB-C (all of them?) can't support an external display.
It supported my 175hz monitor on a M1 Mini.
120Hz is supported, iirc.
apple silicon is virtualization capable and the UTM app (on the app store, but open source so you can build it too) wraps Apple's hypervisor framework, allows me to run on my macbook air (m2 earlier, recently updated to m5 just to get more memory) macos as well as arm versions of both fedora and arch, with plasma and gnome (and i've used hyprland etc to toy around).
it's important to set UTM to use Apple Silicon _virtualization_, because otherwise it uses QEMU and is thereby emulating. With Apple Silicon virtualization, having macos and arch and fedora all going at once is amazing.
pertinent references :
or search for UTM on the Apple app store, where it's prebuilt (and that's what i use successfully).
Because at the time of my purchase I mistakenly believed that fan-less was a given for an ARM laptop; and that ARM laptops were a lot more supported than Apple products; some big names were using ARM linux and raving about it.
It's still is a great laptop and I recommend it for the hardware overall, but not fan-less indeed.
Asahi is like a decade away from being 100% tho
Nah they'd rather try to continue to force snapdragon on windows where no one actually cares about this and the experience is trash.
AArch64 is dead for Windows and client Linux, and the knife is in Qualcomm's hands.
Never trust Qualcomm in the linux space. It only leads to frustration. Somehow I've had to learn this lesson more than once because I'm not the smartest ARM addict.
It is sad to see that they still do not support Snapdragon products with Linux offically as a product