Arm support is expanding on Linux, with Qualcomm announcing Linux support for the Snapdragon X2 Series. Qualcomm said it has been one of the most requested features - so now they're actually getting it properly sorted.
From their news post:
"One of the most-requested capabilities is now real: Snapdragon X2 Series is expanding to Linux, a third operating system alongside Windows and Googlebook. This expansion gives more developers and partners the foundation to build agentic experiences on Snapdragon across a broader range of PC environments. Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development at a kernel level, and now we’re embracing support for Snapdragon X2 Series as a platform directly. We're upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2 Series — including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU — to open the door to developers and partners."
That links to a much bigger post: Announcing Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series Early Developer Preview which goes over a lot of the details on the current status.
With their initial focus being on Debian and Ubuntu, their actual plan is to get everything upstreamed so the developers actually building distributions can just bake in support properly without the need of pulling in patches from elsewhere. It's all being done in stages, so it's still somewhat early days for it right now.
Nice to see even more Arm chips shipping in devices, and getting Linux support. Perhaps in a few years we'll see Arm take up a bigger slice of the desktop market - certainly would be interesting to have some more competition there forcing both AMD and Intel to continue upping their game to the benefit of us all.
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Is someone withholding drivers in contrast with the GPL or do they use some sort of obscure android feature Linus rejected?
Edit:
GoogleBook OS seems to be in some weird bêta stage.
You can buy one, but not download the firmware.
Wikipedia and betawiki describe it as an upcoming OS, but there are already influencer reviews.
Qualcomm seems to think they're doing something new.
It's not a source dump or something it's actively being developed and they're in a very early stage, so Google Book seems to have a lead over Linux in general, which is the one part of this story that makes sense.
They're trying to support hyper basic features like boot, basic I/O, graphics, display, not crashing and involving themselves with the kernel for that.
This is weird, most of this should be handled by standards and firmware not kernel development.
Specifically the ARM architecture, OpenCL, Vulkan and OpenGL.
I see how not crashing could require some kernel patches(everyone makes mistakes), but boot isn't even the kernel's responsibility, the boot loader does that.
I know graphics drivers are a thing and assume they integrate a GPU.
Although display drivers are a thing they're not the problem of the processor manufacturer.
Linux should be able to do that through standardized ARM interfaces.
Last edited by LoudTechie on 24 Sep 2026 at 2:36 pm UTC
Quoting: ShabbyXJust use TurnipThey actually do it's in their press release, but they consider it insufficient and are upstreaming to it.
Quoting: _MarsWith SteamOS for ARM and all those Snapdragon based retro handhelds coming out, there's certainly a market opportunity there, Qualcomm. People crave a more affordable Steam Deck Mini, just saying...I don't crave a steam deck mini, but what I do crave is a Steam Deck XL that runs on ARM. The reason is, the Steam Deck in its current state is just the right amount of heft that if you tried giving it a bigger screen, it would cross the threshold and start being annoyingly heavy. That's why the Lenovo Legion Go 1 & 2 sucks for handheld gaming. It's just so fatiguing to hold a device like that. It becomes a major hindrance to everything.
Give me a bigger OLED HDR screen on a more performant ARM cpu that doesn't get as hot under load so we can make the entire device lighter, and I will buy one. Although the prices of things right now are so absurd that it might have to wait.
RevenantDak 25 Sep 2026
Quoting: LachuI wonder, why they prefer to support Windows prior. I known, Windows supports x86 app on other architectures, which is also needed. On Linux you can compile system and many apps to other arch, what which is needed too for performance reason.Because Microsoft offered them a lot money to be included in their surface laptops.
Normally they sell processors for android, which is Linux based for the reasons you mentioned above.
In this case Microsoft promised to handle this for them.
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