Remember the early buzz around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite laptops — svelte designs, exceptional battery life, and the promise of a new, efficient class of Arm PCs? A fresh round of Linux testing has punctured some of that optimism. Recent benchmarks and hands-on trials show measurable performance regressions, surprising thermal behavior, and a reminder that silicon alone doesn’t make a great laptop experience.
What changed
Phoronix’s end-of-year testing of an Acer Swift 14 AI with a Snapdragon X Elite SoC (running Ubuntu 25.10 plus the X1E Concept packages and a 6.18-derived kernel) revealed that performance has slipped compared with earlier runs from September. In more than a few benchmarks the machine now measures closer to aging Intel Tiger Lake-era chips than to contemporary Ryzen AI or Core Ultra rivals. Worse: the tester saw frequent shutdowns when power/thermal thresholds were hit, a behavior that hadn’t been nearly as common in previous tests.
That combination — slower scores and more aggressive thermal limits — is painful because it undercuts the core selling point of the X Elite family: efficient, sustained performance on Arm.
Why Linux users are seeing trouble
There’s no single smoking gun. Instead, this looks like a perfect storm of software and firmware issues colliding with laptop thermal design:
- Kernel and driver regressions: The Phoronix setup used one of the most up-to-date community stacks available for these machines (the ubuntu/x1e PPA and a Linux 6.18-derived kernel). Still, those very updates appear to have introduced regressions compared with older combinations. On the Arm desktop, small changes in schedulers, governors, or GPU tiling can cascade into large perceived slowdowns.
- Firmware blobs and blobs-only access: Most X Elite laptops require extracting proprietary firmware from a Windows partition for full Adreno GPU support and other functionality. That extra step is cumbersome and, if missed or incorrect, can leave the GPU in a reduced-performance state. Lenovo is an outlier here, shipping necessary firmware into linux-firmware.git for easier use.
- Thermals and device variance: The Acer Swift 14 AI used by Phoronix may simply be a less fortunate example in terms of thermal headroom or firmware tuning. Historically, ARM laptop behavior can vary widely by OEM, and TUXEDO’s recent decision to drop X1 Elite Linux plans underscores vendor hesitancy when results are inconsistent.
- Want to buy an X Elite laptop for Linux? Wait, or be ready to tinker.
- Testing or experimenting? Start with Ubuntu 25.10 ARM64 + ubuntu/x1e PPA; extract firmware blobs correctly; track kernel/Mesa versions closely.
- Need a stable daily driver for Linux? Favor AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptops for now.
Windows is moving faster — for now
The Windows ecosystem for Arm notebooks continues to see momentum: Adobe has shipped Arm-native builds of Premiere and After Effects, Google released an Arm-native Drive client, and Microsoft’s Prism emulation has added AVX/AVX2 support. Those application-level wins make X Elite laptops more compelling under Windows even if the underlying platform still needs polish.
That divergence — decent Windows support, shaky Linux performance — is a common pattern for new architectures. It’s driven by where the commercial pressure and engineering resources are focused.
What this means for buyers and tinkerers
If you want a machine that works well on Linux today, the straightforward advice is to prefer platforms with broader, more mature support: current AMD Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra laptops still offer a smoother out-of-the-box Linux experience.
If you’re curious and willing to tinker: use Ubuntu 25.10 with the X1E PPA, make sure to extract the vendor firmware correctly (or buy a model with firmware published upstream), and expect to tweak thermal and power settings. But be prepared for occasional regressions as upstream kernels and Mesa evolve. For those who follow how mobile apps are adopting Arm, the platform’s improvements in the Windows world and on Android (clients like OpenAI’s Sora are part of that mobile momentum) will continue to push the ecosystem — even if Linux lags for a while (OpenAI’s Sora lands on Android).
Is Qualcomm’s roadmap still promising?
Yes — but slowly. Qualcomm and Linaro engineers are actively upstreaming support for newer chips (X2 Elite work is ongoing) and shipping X1E-specific tweaks into kernel, Mesa, and firmware pipelines. These efforts matter: bringing support into mainline avoids the fragility of distro-specific PPAs and makes regressions less likely over time. There’s also incentive from the broader push toward on-device AI — big vendors are investing in Arm tooling and models (see recent work like Microsoft’s MAI-Image-1) which could indirectly accelerate driver and runtime improvements that benefit Linux as well (Microsoft unveils MAI-Image-1).
Practical checklist
Qualcomm’s X Elite still has the technical ingredients for a great Arm laptop experience — efficient silicon, competitive features, and active upstream work. What it lacks today is the polished, consistent software and firmware bedrock that makes that silicon sing across distributions and devices. For early adopters and hackers it remains an interesting playground; for most buyers looking for a reliable Linux laptop in 2025, the safer road runs through established x86 competitors.
No dramatic denouement here — just a reminder that chip launches are never just about the die. They’re about drivers, firmware, OEM tuning, and a long chain of software that must all march in step. Until that happens, the X Elite’s promise will be attractive in spec sheets, but spotty in daily use.