Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, the latest champion of Windows on Arm, may soon see a pairing with Linux. Tuxedo showed off its prototype for a Snapdragon X Elite laptop shipping with Linux at Computex 2024, with a tentative release coming before the end of the year.
Tuxedo Computers, based out of Germany, hopes to bring high-power Arm processing to a hungry Linux community. Being developed under codename "Drako," its first prototype promises interesting specs. The display is a 16:10 IPS panel running at 2560x1600, with a peak brightness of 400 nits — no word on refresh rates, though Tuxedo has shipped notebooks as fast as 165Hz before. The powerful SoC will be paired with 32GB LPDDR5X RAM and a PCIe Gen 4 SSD of unknown capacity, all housed inside an aluminum body.
Tuxedo's newest laptop will ship with an Arm port of Tuxedo OS, Tuxedo's own Ubuntu-based KDE Plasma distro. Tuxedo's Linux computers typically ship set up to dual-boot Windows and Tuxedo OS, which is likely to be true of Drako as well. The Snapdragon X Elite has had some functions added to recent releases of the Linux kernel, but full support is still to come, expected to arrive by Linux 6.11 within the next six months.
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Tuxedo's release of Drako will hinge entirely on the timetable of Snapdragon X's full support on Linux. Tuxedo's second prototype cannot be completed yet and is waiting on updated drivers which are hoped to arrive in Linux by 6.11. "There are still too many pieces of the hardware, software and delivery capability puzzle missing to even begin to set a release date," says Tuxedo's press release. Still, the company hopes optimistically to be ready by Christmas.
No price point is known yet either, but Tuxedo compared the performance of Snapdragon X Elite to its Pulse and InfinityBook Pro notebooks, which both start at $1,249. You can definitely expect the final form of Drako to cost more than its Windows Snapdragon X counterparts; Windows Copilot+ PCs launching with Snapdragon silicon start at $999.
Tuxedo is no stranger to world-first Linux trendsetting, being the first company to bring an all-AMD Linux gaming laptop to market in 2023. Though Drako will certainly not be a gaming laptop, Tuxedo's track record at least points to it being a serviceable product for its niche market. While a Copilot+ PC will likely be the easiest way to get your hands on Snapdragon X, the act of supporting a Linux-enthusiast company plus the ease of not having to install Linux may be worth an extra few hundred dollars for some buyers.
