Canonical provided a status update concerning the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite powered laptops on the recently released Ubuntu 25.04.
The Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 desktop ISO can be used to install on various Snapdragon X Elite laptops from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft. This is their first time providing an ARM64 desktop ISO of Ubuntu Linux and does provide some newer packages but their Ubuntu 25.10 X1E “Concept” ISO can still have some benefits. Regardless of the path you choose, Canonical notes:
“:warning: Hardware support for Snapdragon X Elite is work-in-progress and lots of features are not yet supported (built-in speakers, webcam, ).”
They also continue advising to install all firmware updates from the system under Microsoft Windows 11 before installing Ubuntu Linux. Additionally, the qcom-firmware-extract package is needed to fetch the firmware files for Linux use from an existing Windows install, so dual booting between Ubuntu and Windows is the highly recommended approach for now with Snapdragon X Elite laptops.
Various known issues remain around systems with more than 32GB of RAM, some device-specific issues, and more. Canonical is planning to eventually have out a new Ubuntu Concept 25.04 image for providing all the latest X Elite bits atop an Ubuntu 25.04 base. More details can be found via the Ubuntu Discourse posting made today for the updated details.
In case you missed it, last week I published Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel that included not only performance benchmarks of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite vs. AMD Ryzen vs. Intel Core laptops, but also the state of the Snapdragon X Elite experience on Ubuntu 24.10/25.04 using an Acer Swift 14 AI laptop.
