Tuxedo scraps its Linux-based Snapdragon X Elite laptop (www.windowscentral.com)

TUXEDO has cancelled its much-anticipated ARM-based Linux notebook built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite (X1E) after roughly 18 months of development, saying the chip proved “less suitable for Linux than expected.” The company cited concrete technical blockers: poor battery runtime under Linux compared with Windows, lack of a viable BIOS/firmware update path, missing fan control, no feasible KVM virtualization on their model, inability to hit advertised USB4 transfer rates, and only partial video decode support because many Linux apps lack the necessary integration. Given the X1E’s age—continuing would have yielded a device using a more-than-two-year-old SoC—TUXEDO paused the project. The decision underscores a broader problem for the Linux/ARM ecosystem: bringing Windows‑first PC SoCs to Linux requires deep upstream driver, firmware and power-management support that vendors don’t always provide. For Linux laptop makers, obstacles are less about raw silicon performance and more about system-level integration (ACPI/firmware, thermal/PWM control, KVM, USB4 stacks, and userland codec support). TUXEDO says it will evaluate Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon X2 Elite and may resume if sufficient work can be reused, but the cancellation highlights how critical vendor collaboration and upstreamed kernel/firmware stacks are to native Linux on ARM.