Snapdragon X Elite on Linux - Its ALIVE!

[@arthurpizza]

There's going to be a point where Linux can be installed and run without Windows on these things. That's when I probably pick up the Snapdraggon Thinkpad used from ebay.

[@zoomdiamondify]

Totally!

[@ShaffafAhmed]

by then x86 processors would be just as good. even now they are very very good.

[@act.13.41]

Work is being done and progress is being made. That's all we can ask for.

[@CyberGizmo]

Indeed it is and good to see you @act.13.41

[@carpetbomberz]

As always appreciate your updates, and timeliness, letting us know wheels are turning, progress is progressing. It's encouraging.

[@CyberGizmo]

Thanks Eric and nice to see you

[@stellarorbit1341]

Great video. The beard looks great on you. I considered getting a snapdragon based laptop, but I guess I'll wait till next release.

[@CyberGizmo]

Thank you @stellarorbit1341 I just hope ARM and Qualcomm resolve their legal issues

[@landspide]

Just purchased a 7x slim, looking forward to contributing.

[@SIackware]

For battery optimization, it would be interesting to see how nicely these snapdragon chips would play with utilities like TLP or even TuneD's "powersave" profile

[@mercster]

"Linux on Snapdragon X Elite."

[@senna476]

Can you use it already in a VM on windows?

[@leibaleibovich5806]

Greetings! A question on a slightly different subject. I remember that several months ago you were planning to a release a series of videos on migration from Windows 10, which is nearing its end of life, to Linux. Being very much interested in this topic, I watched first couple of videos, but I do not recall continuation of the series (unless I missed or misunderstood something). I would love to know whether you are planning making any additional video regarding migration to Linux for disillusioned Windows user (it would be great). Thank you!

[@CyberGizmo]

I am going to space them out a bit over the coming months for a coupe of reasons, one is too not pile up too many of those videos as people will forget about them with a year to go, so wanted to space them out to keep the topic fresh enough as a reminder about what will happen in October 2025. And yes the answer is yes, I am planning to make more.

[@leibaleibovich5806]

@@CyberGizmo That's fantastic! Thank you very much! I am looking forward.

[@livedreamsg]

Would be very interested in a second generation X Elite. The mobile 8 Elite looks like a beast. Having that but tailored to PCs would be fantastic.

[@lale5767]

DJ I have a what-if question. Back in the day when Intel and AMD had legit competitors, what if any of them got money and survived, would any of their architectures have delievered better chips? Would the current chip landscape be different?

[@CyberGizmo]

Great question, back in the day we had MIPS, Dec Alpha, ARM was even a player way back then. I don't think things would shake out any differently, Intel had marketshare, expansion cards, etc and by the time Linux was written Intel had the i386 just at the right time. I always liked memory mapped I/O over the crazy world of interrupts, so I guess that put me in the Motorola camp, but the best at the time of Linux in my humble opinion was the Dec Alpha. But the best is not always the one that becomes dominant in my experience its the one that is most complex. People think complexity is power.

[@lale5767]

@@CyberGizmo I always appreciated the technical history videos. Cheers and thank you.

[@tsugu5151]

Since you talked about the phases of development of a Linux distro, do you happen to know why doesn't Canonical fix severe bugs such as the new flutter installer crashing? Or a desktop icon estension bug being stuck on "In Progress" for many months. That one prevents you from renaming files on the desktop by using arrows. I understand that security is more important than bugs and Canonical doesn't have infinite resources, but such an unstable installer should not have been used in an LTS that's going to be supported for 10 years.

[@CyberGizmo]

That would be a good question for them, just a guess here bugs usually have a priority, and in todays world the higher priority ones get the fix and the lower priority ones languish until a developer is in that part of the code and fixes it.

[@igordasunddas3377]

Bugs solely depend on their impact and severity and get a priority assigned accordingly. So my guess is it's not as widespread perhaps? No idea.

[@DLT-be2oe]

Good eve sir does it means it can support too in snapdragon 8 elite too?

[@CyberGizmo]

I dont know perhaps someone else here knows?

[@TamasKiss-yk4st]

Even the half year old Snapdragon X Elite laptops are not supported fully.. half of them still on the unsupported category.. each has different type of parts, but most importantly different BIOS methods to change the thigs.. alias each of the laptop required countless hours of work to connect the thigs.. they are not unified methods, so the next laptop will use different methods, alias all work need to be done from zero again even if the same chip.. and imagine if only 5 laptops out of the 10 was finished as linux ready, how much work the 50-100 different Snapdragon 8 Elite phones need...

[@GrindAlchemyTech]

Have you ever done a video on building up from a terminal prompt to fully functional system??

[@CyberGizmo]

You mean like a arch install? I did one on ARM way back when I first started the channel, probably time to update it

[@colinstu]

Do you mean something as hardcore as Linux From Scratch? But yeah there's lots of distros you can do that with.. Arch, Gentoo, FreeBSD, even server OS like Ubuntu server. Really nothing that special.

[@CyberGizmo]

@@colinstu I was considering an LFS video it looks like a fun challenge, might do that in early 2025.

[@colinstu]

@ it would be fun/neat to hear your adventure through it!

[@GrindAlchemyTech]

You're so cool...lol....I'm catching up...currently doing an updated version of @lowleveldevel linux from scratch series..it's people like yourself, him, & others helped me catch up with what escaped me over 20yrs ago... thankyou much appreciated 🙌🏽🧙🏾‍♂️

[@Techonsapevole]

Thanks for testing it, Snapdragon on Linux is interesting however the GPU is too weak compared to AMD Strix Point

[@CyberGizmo]

true, and I'd rather have an AMD or Nvidia GPU anyway, now if Nvidia would just give us an ARM version of their drivers. EDIT: One thing I would keep in mind though, 6.11 is not the final GPU drivers, 6.12 is so hopefully we see some improvement.

[@sativagirl1885]

snapdragon x elite v. mini-mac pay-per-view, only at DJ 🙂

[@CyberGizmo]

LOL i guess

[@dominicus9891]

I know it sounds stupid, because most of us Linux people use Firefox or the like, but I still don't like how Google doesn't make ARM64 binaries for Chrome on Linux. It really doesn't make any sense - they make them for their own ARM-Linux platforms (Android and ChromeOS), and recently made a version for ARM Windows - but not regular old ARM Linux?

[@CyberGizmo]

Not stupid sounding, and yep Google doesn't support Chrome on ARM. I use Chromium for ARM64 which also supports Windows on ARM, as well as Debian and Ubuntu. Fedora doesn't include Chromium on their repos (at least they didnt in the past...dunno about Fedora 41 haven't got to it yet). I didn't see you mention Chromium in your post, maybe you have tried it and it doesn't work for you?

[@n.m4497]

QRD on the snapdragons? What the fuzz about it

[@CyberGizmo]

ARM had CPUs which were made for cell phones, which made their way into what we know as nano computers like the Odroid, Raspberry PI, etc. And ARM has CPU which are made for Super Computers like the ones in the Fugaku, and ARM has CPU which go into massive servers from Ampere Computing and Alibaba, but no one has made a Desktop CPU for the rest of us, until last year when Qualcomm announced the Sanpdragon X Elite along with a team of folks beginning to work on LInux, and laptops started shipping in late April, but no Linux in sight, these ran WIndows 11 Co-Pilot edition. So I started doing a seried of videos tracking the progress of the work on Linux last year, and did an update in May when the laptops were shipping. Finally for the first time we have a Linux Desktop on ARM for a price which is mid-tier laptop range. Hope that helps.

[@EZBlast]

Just sound bugging - BT works so I'm fine, the Plasma DT rocks.

[@CyberGizmo]

Nice, yeah its good enough for me as well

[@techzone2009]

Love from Nepal 🇳🇵

[@7_of_9]

The real issue with Linux isn’t the operating system itself, but rather that much of the available software isn’t as reliable as it is on Windows. Additionally, there’s still a limited selection of high-quality, paid software options.

[@CyberGizmo]

If you prefer Windows, that's fine, after all its good to have choices.

[@bhargavjitbhuyan9394]

Linux is a kernel. The operating system is gnu. So, gnu/Linux. Who said that much of the software is not as reliable?? Have you tried ubuntu? If you are talking about davinci resolve, you need to disable some libraries to make it work correctly. You can use it on ubuntu. And also, if you use some thing like ubuntu or zorinos or Debian or Fedora, it would be as stable as windows. Obviously, don't use arch Linux. It is less stable. I recommend ubuntu.

[@adonespitogonaif]

Linux is for power users. I use arch and btrfs. More stable than windows.

[@SIackware]

True, thankfully QEMU/KVM makes this problem easier to deal with

[@CyberGizmo]

@@SIackware So true without QEMU/KVM we'd be running....WSL and that doesn't match what QEMU / KVM is capable of doing