Trying Out Snapdragon X Elite With The Acer Swift 14 AI Laptop On Ubuntu 26.04
Trying Out Snapdragon X Elite With The Acer Swift 14 AI Laptop On Ubuntu 26.04
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Snapdragon-X-Elite-Ubuntu-26.04
Publish Date: 2026-03-14 10:24:00
Source Domain: www.phoronix.com
This week I tried out the current Ubuntu 26.04 development state on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite with the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop I have been using for my X Elite benchmarks over the past year. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a smooth experience with new issues encountered for this Windows On ARM laptop.
Back in December was my last round of Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing with it ending 2025 disappointing for the Snapdragon X Elite Linux experience and performance. The performance had regressed to be even less competitive against Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen laptops and other issues persisted. So I was eager to see how Ubuntu 26.04 is looking now if it improved the experience and also in wanting to compare the Qualcomm Snapdragon X performance against the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” on Linux.
The Ubuntu builds over 2025 for the Snapdragon X laptops varied in quality/support and in testing those encountered different issues. So when it came to trying out an Ubuntu 26.04 daily state this week on the same hardware, I didn’t really know what to expect.
Using the Ubuntu 26.04 ARM64 desktop daily ISO, I booted up on the Acer Swift 14 AI Snapdragon X Elite laptop and proceeded to install. It was off to a typical working experience, phew!
After booting into the Ubuntu 26.04 installation and installing qcom-firmware-extract from the archive to fetch the necessary Qualcomm Snapdragon X firmware assets from the Windows 11 installation on the device, that’s where things began to go downhill. Previous Ubuntu 24.xx/25.xx releases had worked fine with qcom-firmware-extract on this laptop while now ahead of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS I get: error: Device is currently not supported. The qcom-firmware-extract worked fine before but now is no longer working for grabbing the firmware assets from Windows 11. The firmware situation remains a headache for Snapdragon X Linux users with the exception of one ThinkPad laptop where Lenovo graciously permitted the firmware to…
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