Comment by 0xbadcafebee
18 hours ago
Qualcomm did this in 2024. They pushed some patches to LKML, and issued a press release to brag about it. (https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...)
Yet 2 days ago, Tuxedo Computers announced they were abandoning Qualcomm due to crap support. (https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/tuxedo_axes_arm_lapto...).
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.
There is nothing in this press release to suggest they've changed.
Isn't Tuxedo jus a white label reseller?
White label reseller isn't really the right term. They don't design most of their components and buy them wholesale, but they do assemble them and most relevant to this particular comment thread, they do a lot of the device firmware and support stuff.
It's exactly the stuff that they actually do themselves that Qualcomm has been making very hard.
>Yet 2 days ago, Tuxedo Computers announced they were abandoning Qualcomm due to crap support. (
Does Apple offer better support? Qualcomm offers commercial support. I guess Tuuxedo Computers didn't pay for the support?
Apple is a non-sequitur. Tuuxedo is giving up on Qualcomm in favor of AMD and Intel.
Do AMD and Intel require Tuuxedo to pay for premium support in order to get working Linux drivers? No, of course not.
Qualcomm's support for Linux is embarrassing when you compare it to pretty much any processor manufacturer except Apple.
Apple doesn't actively lock and act hostile towards the reverse engineering folks. They just do their thing and sometimes do small jests to allow these folks to boot anything they want and play with the hardware.
...and while they're standing away from GPL stuff, they do have a dedicated site for Open Source software: https://opensource.apple.com/
Go to releases, and see what they do there.
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Macs have an open bootloader that allows users to run an unsigned OS like Asahi Linux (without having it degrade security when you do boot MacOS).