Ubuntu Support Ongoing For The Arm-Based Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Laptop

Plans to have official support for the Arm-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen1 laptop in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS sadly didn't pan out. But there is semi-working support available for running Ubuntu 24.04 on this Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 powered laptop.

Ubuntu developer Juerg Haefliger has been working on the effort for getting Ubuntu on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen1 laptop. This laptop and the Snapdracon 8cx Gen3 SoC has seen much work upstreamed and various Linux distributions eyeing support for this laptop given its relatively robust availability and overall a nice unit from Lenovo. Much of the work has been mainlined for months now but still some remains a work-in-progress.

In a new status post Juerg mentions that the Linux 6.8 kernel of Ubuntu 24.04 is in good shape for this laptop/SoC overall, there is a new "ubuntu-x13s-settings" package to provide X13s-specific configurations currently in a PPA, and that the current Ubuntu 24.04 installer ISOs are broken on this laptop so currently you need to use the older Ubuntu 23.10 installer ISOs and then upgrade.

If going the route from installing Ubuntu 23.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen1 and then upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04, some of the known issues are the web camera not working, audio volume is low, hibernation and lowest-power suspend not working, virtualization not working, and other features like the TPM and fingerprint reader likely not working.

Hopefully we'll see better support out of Ubuntu Linux on the ThinkPad X13s laptop soon as well as the various other interesting Arm laptops coming to market in the months ahead.