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kop316 | 3 months 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.

discuss

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h14h|3 months 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|3 months 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."

hypercube33|3 months 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|3 months 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.

TreeInBuxton|3 months 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

kelnos|3 months 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.

zamadatix|3 months 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|3 months 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.

PunchyHamster|3 months 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

alganet|3 months ago

A businesss decision would be great. What would suck would be a marketing decision.

throwaway173738|3 months ago

Today’s marketing decisions are tomorrow’s business decisions.

gessha|3 months 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|3 months 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|3 months 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).

OsrsNeedsf2P|3 months ago

Librem5 and Jolla are actively developed

jorvi|3 months 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.