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.
aseipp 7 hours ago [-]
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.
wmf 6 hours ago [-]
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.
aseipp 6 hours ago [-]
Point well taken.
senectus1 10 hours ago [-]
holy hell.. the price tags...!
modeless 2 hours ago [-]
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?
red_admiral 2 hours ago [-]
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.
geerlingguy 10 hours ago [-]
$4,300-$6,000+, wow you're not wrong. And that's just 32 or 64 GB of RAM.
r_lee 2 hours ago [-]
why on earth would anyone buy that shit if you can buy a macbook pro that literally looks and feels like art vs. a plastic windows laptop?
it used to be that Apple was the pricier option but I guess not anymore
aacid 1 hours ago [-]
someone who doesn't want apple experience? I really don't need "art" computer if I'm not able to do what I want on it.
alessandroberna 1 hours ago [-]
Of course a 1000$+ windows laptop is going to look and feel like a low end 300$ one /s
wmf 10 hours ago [-]
Something has gone wrong at HP. They are also charging $7,000 for Strix Halo.
esseph 7 hours ago [-]
HP is nuts
HPE I've had very good luck with for HCI.
_fzslm 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pylotlight 9 hours ago [-]
It's really that weak?
keyle 10 hours ago [-]
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]
If you want fanless arm linux machine, why not macbook m2 air + asahi linux ?
jjtheblunt 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Asahi still doesn't support a lot of basic things like: external displays, Thunderbolt, hardware accelerated video decoding, 120hz refresh rate, etc.
atlimar 2 hours ago [-]
It supports external displays, just not on any port
cromka 3 hours ago [-]
120Hz is supported, iirc.
keyle 10 hours ago [-]
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.
sharts 9 hours ago [-]
Asahi is like a decade away from being 100% tho
pjmlp 4 hours ago [-]
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.
guilamu 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't you say that Valve is an exception to that rule?
MindSpunk 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jogu 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tlamponi 4 hours ago [-]
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...
re-thc 4 hours ago [-]
Qualcomm aims to sue and monopolize so no sharing is caring for them. They want control.
pjmlp 4 hours ago [-]
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.
disdi89 7 hours ago [-]
It is sad to see that they still do not support Snapdragon products with Linux offically as a product
nullpoint420 7 hours ago [-]
Just upstream your drivers! Then you don't need Qualcomm Linux.... you just have Linux.
eschaton 7 hours ago [-]
Why can’t upstream just take their drivers? Isn’t that the point of requiring those drivers to be GPL?
zamadatix 7 hours ago [-]
Imagine you wrote a WYSIWYG text editor, like Libre Office Writer. You have all sorts of functionality and an overall architecture which makes it sane to upkeep the project & have things work well together. Then someone else makes a custom font, but kind of does it their own way and with a different approach making it a one off from the way the rest of the fonts all work and are used in the program maybe using a custom font file format parser and different UI element even though you know it could have just used the normal, already maintained and planned out code paths.
You can of course merge anything with the right license if you so like, like that one off font code into your editor, but if it doesn't fit well into the overall project or meet the general quality standards of it then it's not practical to and can actually be worse than not including it. Upstreaming is about submitting something the maintainer can reasonably accept and maintain, not just about whether working code is available. GPL licensed code provides the latter, it's still up to someone (either the original company or some other interested person) to make it fit right first.
noselasd 2 hours ago [-]
Ofcourse they can. But which particular person will do it ?
The "upstream" people deal with their own drivers, subsystems or tasks which takes up their time - but if someone feels they want to take on this too, they'll do it (normally that doesn't happen - it's up to the original authors to take responsibility)
wmf 6 hours ago [-]
Upstream requires a level of quality most developers cannot meet.
mjg59 1 hours ago [-]
"Quality" is maybe overloaded. Upstream requires the code to meet their sense of taste, and some of that is about quality, and some of that is about undocumented design concepts. It's not hard to meet the quality bar. Meeting the design requirements is extremely hard.
mjg59 1 hours ago [-]
Linux tries to avoid special cases. That means that when someone shows up with a new driver that's either not something that fits into an existing category, or which sort of (but doesn't entirely) overlap with an existing driver, there's an extended set of design discussions about how to make this new driver fit into existing infrastructure in a way that's consistent with what's there and which also allows new things to exist.
That sounds great from a design perspective, but it can also lead to cases where people are attempting to design for utter unknowns - potential futures that may or may not exist, theoretical understandings of how hardware works, that kind of thing. It frequently prevents new drivers being merged without significant modification, and sometimes it results in a need to entirely rearchitect the relevant part of the kernel before the driver can even be considered (and also now you need to split that driver into three parts). Upstreaming is hard.
realusername 6 hours ago [-]
The quality of the qcom code is way too low for upstream
We'll see. They purposely dropped all server/console support and now only offer a Debian desktop image, which seems crazy for an SBC. Not exactly a welcome mat:
> Other variants that were previously provided AS-IS are no longer provided. Interested users need to build those by themselves.
I've personally been wrestling with their broken I2C for a couple weeks.
Really want to love this board but lots of sharp edges at the moment. Hopefully Qualcomm keeps dedicating resources to improving things - I know it's hard work!
Skinney 3 hours ago [-]
MNT just started offering the QCS6490 for their laptops.
it's not giving me any warm and fuzzy.
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.
it used to be that Apple was the pricier option but I guess not anymore
HPE I've had very good luck with for HCI.
Torture.
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
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 :
https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
or search for UTM on the Apple app store, where it's prebuilt (and that's what i use successfully).
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
It's still is a great laptop and I recommend it for the hardware overall, but not fan-less indeed.
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.
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.
They’re doing it in a manner that has broad benefits, but it’s definitely a win-win situation.
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.
You can of course merge anything with the right license if you so like, like that one off font code into your editor, but if it doesn't fit well into the overall project or meet the general quality standards of it then it's not practical to and can actually be worse than not including it. Upstreaming is about submitting something the maintainer can reasonably accept and maintain, not just about whether working code is available. GPL licensed code provides the latter, it's still up to someone (either the original company or some other interested person) to make it fit right first.
The "upstream" people deal with their own drivers, subsystems or tasks which takes up their time - but if someone feels they want to take on this too, they'll do it (normally that doesn't happen - it's up to the original authors to take responsibility)
That sounds great from a design perspective, but it can also lead to cases where people are attempting to design for utter unknowns - potential futures that may or may not exist, theoretical understandings of how hardware works, that kind of thing. It frequently prevents new drivers being merged without significant modification, and sometimes it results in a need to entirely rearchitect the relevant part of the kernel before the driver can even be considered (and also now you need to split that driver into three parts). Upstreaming is hard.
> Other variants that were previously provided AS-IS are no longer provided. Interested users need to build those by themselves.
https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-dragon-q6a
AI / NPU use cases have been severely hampered as well:
https://gist.github.com/Foadsf/3cc2e0ed357c3ac7180589701bf83...
I've personally been wrestling with their broken I2C for a couple weeks.
Really want to love this board but lots of sharp edges at the moment. Hopefully Qualcomm keeps dedicating resources to improving things - I know it's hard work!
https://mnt.re/media/reform_md/2026-06-30-june-update.html