Ubuntu 24.10 Developer Preview Released For Snapdragon X1 Elite Laptops
As covered last month on Phoronix, Canonical engineers have been working on bringing up Snapdragon X1 Elite hardware with Ubuntu Linux. Now that most elements of the Snapdragon X1 Elite SoC support is upstream and in Linux 6.11~6.12 we have seen various DeviceTree files added for different Snapdragon X1 laptops, the upstream kernel support is coming together and making it easier for Linux distributions to support.
This Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview is targeted at early adopters and their ultimate hope is to provide an installation image that will "just work" on as many Snapdragon X1 Elite systems as possible. It may lead to a more generic ARM64 installer in the future but that is still a lofty goal with so many ARM consumer devices still depending upon Device Tree.
The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 has been the device seeing the most testing by Canonical and expected to work the best at this stage.
While there is now this Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview to ease the process of setting up Ubuntu Linux on modern Qualcomm-powered laptops, there are various feature limitations that remain. Additionally, necessary firmware files still cannot be easily redistributed by Ubuntu or other Linux distributions until they have been relicensed. So for now users need to hoop through the headache of having to fetch the firmware files from their Microsoft Windows installation for use under Linux.
More details on this new Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops via the Ubuntu Discourse.
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