Tuxedo cancels Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop project

For the past 18 months, the Linux OEM Tuxedo Computers has been working on bringing a Snapdragon X Elite ARM laptop to market, but now they cancelled the project due to complications.

Development turned out to be challenging due to the different architecture, and in the end, the first-generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected. In particular, the long battery runtimes—usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices—were not achieved under Linux. A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control. Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates. Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support.

Given these conditions, investing several more months of development time does not seem sensible, as it is not foreseeable that all the features you can rightfully expect would be available in the end. In addition, we would be offering you a device with what would then be a more than two-year-old Snapdragon X Elite (X1E), whose successor, the Snapdragon X2 Elite (X2E), was officially introduced in September 2025 and is expected to become available in the first half of 2026.
↫ Tuxedo’s announcement

Back when Qualcomm was hyping up these processors, the company made big claims about supporting Linux equally to Windows, but those promises have turned out to be absolutely worthless. Tuxedo already highlighted the problems it was dealing with half a year ago, and now it seems these problems have become impossible to overcome – at least for now. This is a shame, bu also not entirely unexpected, since there’s no way a small Linux OEM can do the work that Qualcomm promised it would do for its own chip.

All this sadly means we still don’t really have proper Linux support for modern ARM laptops, which is a crying shame. The problem isn’t so much Linux itself, but the non-standardised world of ARM hardware. Large OEMs are willing to do the work to make Windows work, but despite recent successes, desktop Linux is nowhere near as popular as Windows, so there’s little incentive for OEMs (or Qualcomm) to step up their game.

It is what it is.