I bought the Snapdragon Elite X over a year ago based on the promises of Qualcomm to bring solid Linux drivers at some point. Fast forward to today, Linux for that SoC is still a hot mess.

Yeah never buy based on future promises.

Maybe I'm being overly hopeful, but given the DGX Spark only runs Linux, and this is apparently a sibling in a laptop form factor, maybe it won't be too difficult to get Linux up and running effectively? Probably (a lot) more easily than Asahi on Apple Silicon, anyway.

I'm sure someone can get the CPU/GPU running but things like wifi/bluetooth/USB ports will be rough since they will presumably integrated with the chip in a non-standardized ARM way. Almost all of the ARM laptops are basically unusable with GNU/Linux.

Which ones have you tried? Right now I'm on an MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910.and wifi/USB/sleep/hibernate works. DT is going to be the death of ARM, but the real challenge has been to get the GPU to work under Firefox.

One of the hassles with ARM machines is that you might technically be able to boot Linux on it but your Thunderbolt, display out, wireless, etc. will lack support and not work.

They did put linux on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

That's not Linux, that's a VM running Linux on Windows. Not very satisfying if you want the real thing, or want a real Linux DE.

>that's a VM running Linux on Windows

While thats true, its not what you think it is. WSL1 was VM in a traditional sense, it ran under windows. When you install WSL2, it basically changes your computer core OS to be a bare metal hypervisor (specialized version of Hyper V). Its the same concept as any cloud provider letting people provision VMs that run at native performance on the actual hardware. So WLS2 can talk to hardware like Graphics cards natively, and request ram on demand.

You can also install windows managers in WSL2. For example https://github.com/Lamarcke/i3-on-wsl. You can also install rainmeter on windows https://www.rainmeter.net/ if you want customizability. You can make windows look exactly like mac os with that.

WSL 1 was not a VM in a traditional sense. WSL 1 was a Windows subsystem which translated Linux syscalls into NT syscalls (e.g. file open). NT has capabilities there from its origins in the 90s supporting in theory user spaces for posix/os2/...

Syscall translation is pretty much what userland vm software does.

Interix was better! I look back fondly on my Gentoo GNU/Windows desktop. Imagine a full first rate native POSIX subsystem, with equal footing to Win32. The things we lost over the decades, I could cry...

WSL is second rate, comparatively.