We are nearing one year since the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops shipped with Windows 11 ARM. For the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release it’s looking like more of these ARM-powered laptops will have somewhat usable support at least for those wanting to avoid Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen laptops.
With the current Ubuntu 24.10 release there has been “developer preview” images for Snapdragon X1 laptops but depending upon the laptop model your mileage may vary and different features not necessarily supported. With time more features continue to be enabled with the upstream Linux kernel and trickling down to Ubuntu and other ARM Linux distributions. The upstream kernel state for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptops still isn’t ideal but at least continuing to improve the better part of a year since these laptops first shipped — and better than the upstream state of Apple Silicon support.
For the Ubuntu 25.04 release in April, the Snapdragon X1 Elite support will take another step forward. Ubuntu 25.04 is to be running the Linux 6.14 kernel by default for benefiting from the latest upstream code. The Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview work for Snapdragon laptops has also updated to having a 6.14 kernel option already.
With Ubuntu 25.04 the there is also now going to be the qcom-firmware-extract package in the Ubuntu repository. The qcom-firmware-extract package is used for extracting Qualcomm firmware files from a Windows partition on the system. This is a stop-gap measure until the Qualcomm firmware files are under a proper license and can be freely redistributed by Linux distributions — another initial limitation for Linux on these Qualcomm-powered laptops. At least having qcom-firmware-extract in the Ubuntu archive lowers the initial user barrier for fetching those firmware files from a Windows install.
Also being worked on for Ubuntu 25.04 is adding ubuntu-x1e-settings. The ubuntu-x1e-settings continues various “tweaks and configs to make the installer ‘just work’” on these laptops. As for some of those changes needed:
“The package provides 3 binary packages.
– hwe-qcom-x1e-meta: This is picked up by “ubuntu-drivers –recommended” in subiquity and pulls in ubuntu-x1e-settings
– ubuntu-x1e-settings: A full set of configs needed to make a installation work. This includes statically configured kernel command line parameters that would regress other devices
– ubuntu-x1e-settings-nogrub: A safe subset of ubuntu-x1e-settings without the kernel command line. On our live media we want those to be set at runtime depending on which device we boot on to prevent regressions”
As of this week the ubuntu-x1e-settings package has made it into Ubuntu 25.04.
So with how things are pacing, it’s looking like Ubuntu 25.04 could offer a decent experience for at least most of the current Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops but depending upon the model some features may remain unsupported. We’ll see where things settle in Ubuntu and the upstream kernel by the time of the April release.
