Ubuntu and Tuxedo duke it out for Linux on Snapdragon X Elite laptops

From PC World: In summer of last year, we saw several laptops with new Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm released.

Many users were impressed by them, as Snapdragon laptops aren’t just fast but also power-efficient, offering much longer battery life and requiring virtually no fan. PCWorld’s Mark Hachman was personally impressed by his Snapdragon laptop while on a business trip. Plus, with the integrated NPU (neural processing unit), these laptops also have local AI capabilities with lots of future processing potential.

But for some, there’s been one big problem with these Snapdragon laptops: they could only run Windows 11. No Linux distribution was able to support them well due to numerous technical problems, and that was despite the existence of Arm editions of Linux. Qualcomm had even originally announced its intention to actively support Linux with them.

That said, one of the first Linux providers to come out of the woodwork early on was the Augsburg-based company Tuxedo.

In June 2024, the manufacturer presented a prototype with a Snapdragon X Elite processor at Computex in Taiwan. Tuxedo announced its own Linux implementation as the operating system. In July 2024, however, a spokesperson for the company admitted that the hardware was already ready, but that there was “still a lot to do” on the software side. After that, the project went quiet.

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