We are happy to announce the next iteration of our Ubuntu concept image for Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops with our new X Elite developer preview. This new image has been rebased on the latest Ubuntu 24.10 release and comes with all the great benefits of Oracular Oriole.
Our goal is to provide a developer preview targeted at early adopters who aren’t afraid of bleeding edge platform support and breaking changes. The Ubuntu concept format allows us to iterate quickly and test new experimental features to learn how we can improve the Ubuntu arm64 desktop experience in our coming releases.
While our last concept image focused exclusively on the Lenovo Thinkpad X13s, this time we want to try something more ambitious: A single Ubuntu image that “just works” on as much Snapdragon X Elite hardware as we or the community can get our hands on to see how the future of a generic arm64 installer might look like.
Currently our image known to work best on the Lenovo Thinkpad T14s. To expand that list we are looking for help from our community, see Contributing below for more info.
Disclaimer:
The provided image and all included software is experimental and not suited for production use. The image comes without warranty or official support and is provided on a best effort basis.
Getting Started
Start by downloading our installer image and flashing it to a usb drive. We recommend backing up your Windows installation, creating a recovery drive and installing Ubuntu next to Windows in a dual-boot setup. For the time being Windows is required to install firmware updates. For the installer to work Secure Boot has to be disabled in the BIOS settings and we recommend using a USB-C port since that works more reliably on all our supported machines.
Some features require additional firmware files that we can not distribute in Ubuntu until they are available under a suitable license. As a workaround they can be extracted from an existing Windows installation, either manually or with the packaged qcom-firmware-extract
tool. After rebooting into your installed system run sudo apt install qcom-firmware-extract
and sudo qcom-firmware-extract
and reboot again to load the new firmware.
What works
Devices we have seen successful installations on:
- ASUS Vivobook S 15
- Dell XPS 13 9345 (32GB and 64GB)
- HP Omnibook X 14
- Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (32Gb and 64GB)
- Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x
Currently not (yet) supported:
Contributing
All our source code is publicly available on Launchpad in our ~ubuntu-concept/x1e PPA and as git repositories under the ~ubuntu-concept launchpad team.
An easy way to help us enable more hardware is supplying us with more information on machines we don’t currently have physical access to by opening a bug on Launchpad against the ubuntu-concept project and tagging it with your hardware. For examples you can have a look at our open bugs.
Advanced users can use livefs-editor to modify the image and change device trees, grub config, kernel etc to get it working on more hardware.
We are planning to publish a more detailed guide on how to build your own images and porting to new hardware in the future.
Thanks
We would like to thank the open source community and in particular #aarch64-laptops on OFTC, Linaro and everyone involved in the Linux upstream kernel development that enables this project, as well as Lenovo, Qualcomm and Dell who supported us with valuable feedback and test hardware!
Update 1:
We are seeing lots of valuable contributions from the community and managed to already get a few more devices tested and managed to expand our list of devices that the installer supports. I added a new What works section above to provide an overview of what works.