This week I tried out the current Ubuntu 26.04 development state on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite with the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop I have been using for my X Elite benchmarks over the past year. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a smooth experience with new issues encountered for this Windows On ARM laptop.
Back in December was my last round of Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing with it ending 2025 disappointing for the Snapdragon X Elite Linux experience and performance. The performance had regressed to be even less competitive against Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen laptops and other issues persisted. So I was eager to see how Ubuntu 26.04 is looking now if it improved the experience and also in wanting to compare the Qualcomm Snapdragon X performance against the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” on Linux.
The Ubuntu builds over 2025 for the Snapdragon X laptops varied in quality/support and in testing those encountered different issues. So when it came to trying out an Ubuntu 26.04 daily state this week on the same hardware, I didn’t really know what to expect.
Using the Ubuntu 26.04 ARM64 desktop daily ISO, I booted up on the Acer Swift 14 AI Snapdragon X Elite laptop and proceeded to install. It was off to a typical working experience, phew!
After booting into the Ubuntu 26.04 installation and installing qcom-firmware-extract from the archive to fetch the necessary Qualcomm Snapdragon X firmware assets from the Windows 11 installation on the device, that’s where things began to go downhill. Previous Ubuntu 24.xx/25.xx releases had worked fine with qcom-firmware-extract on this laptop while now ahead of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS I get: error: Device is currently not supported. The qcom-firmware-extract worked fine before but now is no longer working for grabbing the firmware assets from Windows 11. The firmware situation remains a headache for Snapdragon X Linux users with the exception of one ThinkPad laptop where Lenovo graciously permitted the firmware to be upstreamed to linux-firmware.git to avoid this firmware handling mess.
Fortunately I had a backup copy of the firmware assets from the tool’s previous successful capture of the Acer Swift 14 AI firmware binaries to /lib/firmware/updates that had worked fine on Ubuntu. After positioning them and rebuilding the initramfs and a reboot, no go. No 3D acceleration and no battery reporting. That’s for the current Linux 6.19 based kernel used on Ubuntu 26.04 ARM64.
Seeing that Canonical still maintains the X1E Concept PPA for the Snapdragon X1 Elite hardware and with Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute” support, I decided to try that Qualcomm-catered 6.19 kernel build.
When trying that tailored X1E kernel build for Ubuntu 26.04, after the GDM log-in screen I simply get a gray screen… Several boots later and attempted workarounds, no luck. Only if falling back to the generic Ubuntu 26.04 Linux 6.19 ARM64 kernel do I get back to a desktop albeit with LLVMpipe software acceleration and the other missing hardware support.
So, sadly, the Snapdragon X Elite Linux experience at least for this Acer Swift 14 AI laptop remains a very frustrating experience. Over the past year it seems each time I try out the Ubuntu Linux builds on this WOA laptop it presents its own set of new regressions or issues. This time around it’s surprising that qcom-firmware-extract no longer acknowledges this laptop as a supported device when it’s worked fine every time using that tool the past year. It’s far from being suitable as a daily driver laptop and from the prior Linux performance benchmarks comes up short of AMD Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra in most workloads on Linux. We’ll see if further improvements land for Ubuntu 26.04 to benefit the X1E experience, which may still be possible given the Linux 7.0 plans, but in any event we’ll see if any last minute miracles occur for Snapdragon X Elite with next month’s Ubuntu 26.04 LTS official debut. For now though this means no X1E comparison benchmarks against the new Intel Panther Lake hardware on Linux. It also seems like it was a wise choice for TUXEDO Computers having dropped their Snapdragon X1 laptop plans last year given all the headaches involved.
