The Snapdragon X series of laptops took the technological space by storm when they were first announced earlier this year, boasting improved performance, whisper quiet fan designs and unparalleled battery life.
Unfortunately, these laptops have had very scarce Linux support out of the box, forcing its users to stick to Windows on ARM for the unforeseeable future. That being said, things might be looking to change for the better, as the Fedora 44 aims to provide a nice out of the box experience for most end users.
Snapdragon X Laptops To Get A Smoother Out-Of-The-Box Linux Installation Experience With Fedora 44
Things seem to be going for the better with regards to running Linux on Snapdragon X ARM laptops, especially after Hans de Goede (a veteran Red Hat engineer) joined Qualcomm after devoting years to tweaking Intel and AMD laptops for the operating system.
With his work, Linux on Qualcomm ARM64 laptops is starting to feel a lot better, with their newest change proposal to make Fedora Linux live images work out of the box, something which wasn’t possible before.
This is a pretty massive step that makes installing Linux on these laptops a whole lot easier, although it does seem to be easily doable on Fedora Linux only. However, this should quite easily be ported over to alternative Linux distros such as Arch Linux ARM (ALARM).
This change should hopefully get more users into Linux on ARM devices, which feels undercooked when compared to x86 versions of desktop Linux distributions. Linux on Snapdragon hit a massive wall when PC maker Tuxedo Computers issued a statement mentioning that developing Linux was ‘less suitable than expected’ on the first gen X1E chips.
With Linux options looking bleak, here’s hoping that Hans’ efforts pay off and make the platform a whole lot better than it is currently, up to some usable form.
