Comment by kop316

1 day ago

As someone who uses Mobile Linux, I am pretty excited to see this, but I can't help but wonder if this is only a "Business decision" and not necessarily Qualcomm turning over a new leaf for being FOSS friendly:

- Their Snapdragon X laptop didn't do very well, and they likely realize an ARM Windows laptop will always be a second class citizen: https://www.techpowerup.com/329255/snapdragon-x-failed-qualc... .

- Likewise, Mobile SoCs are completely dependent on Android without proper upstreaming (which they haven't done in the past).

- They are seeing Valve spending time and money on FOSS support paying off, especially with their new hardware releases.

On the other hand, proper upstreaming of the chips give them much more flexibility for different linux-based OSes.

40 comments

kop316

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h14h  1 day ago

I'm personally rooting for "business decision" over "turning over a new leaf".

If FOSS support is motivated by a clear profit motive, then it'll be viewed positively by shareholders and stick around no matter who is in charge. If FOSS support comes from "turning over a new leaf", it could be dropped at a moment's notice in response to a leadership change.

IMO we will always see far better FOSS support from the private sector when the time they invest has a positive ROI that is obvious and easy to brag about in a quarterly earnings call.

  • kbenson  1 day ago

    Incentives trump feelings for publicly traded companies 99 times out of 100. People constantly anthropomorphize them, but they aren't people (regardless of similarities in the law), and they definitely don't act like people, at least normal ones. At best, you can view them as something like a sociopath. I wouldn't look at a sociopath acting nicer and think "oh, they turned over a new leaf" because they aren't just going to change how their mind works, I'd think "oh, they found a reason to act in a way I like for the time being. I hope it isn't short lived."

    • Voultapher  1 day ago

      I like to call them slow-AI. They are paperclip optimizing AIs. No single component wants the larger outcomes, yet they happen. These slow-AIs are terraforming our planet into a less habitable one in order to make GDP number go up, at any cost.

      7 replies →

hypercube33  1 day ago

Snapdragon does poorly I think because it's a bet if it works or not. Windows runs things seamlessly other than OpenGL (it can run that too but it's not anything strait forward - needs the gl to dx store app thing) but the other reason is cost. for the premium business laptop most buyers (business) won't budge off Intel even because of the "no one got fired for buying IBM" mentality at the big Enterprises Ive been at.

I will say with my 8 gen 3 snapdragon I'm impressed and also disappointed - stupid thing needs active cooling and I'm pretty sure it's bad enough that it's desoldered or damaged the core or something from heat but also you can't get driver updates for the GPU if you wanted because Qualcomm be the way it do.

  • HackingWizard  1 day ago

    Driver update depends on your OEM. Both ARM and Qualcomm send driver updates for their premium and upper highend Socs. The support reaching your phone is on the OEM. Google has started to push direct GPU driver updates starting with Pixel 10. So, hopefully others may follow too.

    • robotnikman  1 day ago

      Usually GPU vendors (Nvidia, Intel, AMD) provide a way to download and install drivers manually (on Windows), including specific versions or older versions. Qualcomm is an outlier in this case.

      3 replies →

  • TreeInBuxton  1 day ago

    I've used basically every Windows on Arm machine - I actually quite like my X Elite ThinkPad T14s Gen6, compared the the X13s - feels like they got everything right, that the X13s got wrong

    • pjmlp  10 hours ago

      The very first they got wrong is how hard it is to buy Dell XPS with Linux on most European countries.

      Naturally nowhere to be found on PC stores, and online I never found it on sale in the Dell store.

      2 replies →

kelnos  1 day ago

Of course it's a "business decision". Companies don't do things for any other reason. They see a benefit to upstreaming in this instance, and will do it again (or not) depending on whether or not they expect to see benefits in the future.

This is no different from any other company that has "embraced" open source.

PunchyHamster  1 day ago

I'd imagine it's purely because not doing it turned out to be PITA in the long term.

As with pretty much all other ARM cpu vendors that pushed for their own kernel fork just to have drivers that did not need to be okayed by mainstream kernel, it was faster iteration to deliver something working to their clients; but it was also PITA to their clients, especially when industry started demanding longer support for their devices

zamadatix  1 day ago

It'll probably be as much of a second class citizen elsewhere (the real problem is the hardware hasn't as good as Apple Silicon laptops but has been in the same price class at the bottom) but it's good they chase everywhere rather than just one use case.

  • kop316  1 day ago

    In the case of Linux, that issue is solely because of non-upstreamed drivers. With that, it can be a first class citizen just like any other processor.

    • zamadatix  1 day ago

      It's second class on Windows because it doesn't support game DRM and generally performs worse for the price than an x86 laptop. About the thing it really has going for it is better battery life. Using Linux doesn't really change either of those problems, though it does get you away from the mess that is Windows 11.

      1st party native software support is high and 3rd party native software support is higher than Linux. Both have feature complete userspace emulation layers for the 3rd party part (largely game focused) Windows doesn't need Proton for that. Both can run open source apps natively.

      2 replies →

gessha  14 hours ago

Their problem was that they had the performance claims and marketing of Apple but the implementation of Microsoft Teams. Apple M1 was shaky but all the groundwork was there and it took off. Qualcomm was highly questionable at best.

a-dub  14 hours ago

it makes some sense for embedded stuff, linux is only continuing to gain ground there.

are there any linux phone projects that are actively maintained and used in 2025? i was under the impression that android kinda subsumed them all.

  • ryukafalz  14 hours ago

    Software-wise: Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS, and Mobian are all actively maintained. Ubuntu Touch uses Lomiri as its UI which is somewhat bespoke (though they're working on disentangling it from the distro for packaging elsewhere), the others use various mobile Linux UIs (and there's a surprisingly large variety of options there).

jorvi  1 day ago

> Their Snapdragon X laptop didn't do very well, and they likely realize an ARM Windows laptop will always be a second class citizen

Why? So far ARM laptops provide either vastly better battery life for the same performance or vastly better performance for the same battery life. Even versus discrete GPUs.

Within a couple years from now you're gonna look like an utter fool for buying x86 (and Nvidia / AMD / Intel GPU) unless Intel, AMD and Nvidia really pull their head out of the sand.

There's a few specific workloads like local LLM and legacy where you'd want a discrete GPU or x86, but otherwise it is looking like GG.