Our last update on our Ubuntu Concept Snapdragon enablement work has been a while ago and a lot has happened since. An entirely new generation of Snapdragon X2 consumer hardware has been released and at the Snapdragon Summit earlier this month Qualcomm has announced they are working on official Linux support for the new laptops and Canonical has announced a strategic partnership with Qualcomm to provide an official, certified and fully optimized Snapdragon X2 Ubuntu image targeted for 2027.
For those who can’t wait to test Ubuntu on their new Snapdragon machine and who don’t mind a less polished early preview experience, we are happy to announce the latest iteration of our experimental Ubuntu Concept ISO including initial enablement for Snapdragon X2 machines as well as many other nice improvements and fixes that landed in Linux 7.3.
Since we are only weeks from the Ubuntu 26.10 release, we are going to do things a little differently this time. In close coordination with the Ubuntu release management team we decided to jump straight to the Ubuntu 26.10 Beta for our new concept ISO. Hopefully this will help us catch bugs in the upcoming release early and get some additional user feedback on all the latest improvements in Stonking Stingray. If everything goes well, we expect most of our work to also land it in the official 26.10 release next month.
A (non-comprehensive) list of additions since our last ISO:
- Landed initial enablement for the following X2 laptops:
- ASUS Zenbook A14/A16
- Lenovo Yoga Slim 7
- HP EliteBook X G2q
- New X1 machines
- Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3
- Lenovo Ideacentre Mini 01q8x10
- HONOR MagicBook Art 14
Getting Started
The new concept ISO is available for download at people.canonical.com/~platform/images/ubuntu-concept.
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 newly installed system, run sudo apt install qcom-firmware-extract and sudo qcom-firmware-extract and reboot again to load the new firmware.
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.
A guide for building our concept kernel the Ubuntu way is available here on discourse.
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 everyone involved in the Linux upstream kernel development that enables this project, as well as Lenovo, HP, Qualcomm and Dell who supported us with valuable feedback and test hardware.