Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel
Hitting the GNOME desktop of Ubuntu 25.04 in this live USB environment, it was exciting to see how easily it booted and what a nice initial impression... It was falling back to LLVMpipe software acceleration for the graphics and the battery indicator showed 0% with the battery reporting not working, but I was at a desktop at the native panel resolution and it was "just working" from this modern ARM64 laptop. So then I proceeded to install and reboot. Unfortunately, that's when things began to spiral down.
👁 Acer Swift 14 AI running Ubuntu Linux
When trying to boot the installed Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 desktop installation, after the GRUB bootloader screen the system would reset a few seconds later. Constantly. While the live USB booted fine, the clean install of the Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 was unable to boot presumably due to some missing kernel bits or related to the DT.
After reading through the Ubuntu Discourse on the Snapdragon X Elite support, I decided to fall-back and install the Ubuntu 24.10 Developer Preview / X1E Concept image. Booting that off USB worked fine and similar to Ubuntu 25.04 but there wasn't any WiFi working out-of-the-box there... But I was able to install Ubuntu 24.10 and reboot and it booted just fine off the NVMe SSD.
👁 Acer Swift 14 AI with Ubuntu
Using the Ubuntu 24.10 X1E concept image was working out besides the lack of WiFi, no battery reporting, an occasional blue screen followed by a system reset, and falling back to LLVMpipe for graphics acceleration. But at least I was up and running. I was able to get the graphics acceleration and battery reporting working after installing qcom-firmware-extract manually to extract the Qualcomm firmware files from the Windows partition. It's important to not wipe out the WIndows partition.
So I ran some benchmarks there looking at the Ubuntu 24.10 performance and then proceeded with a do-release-upgrade to Ubuntu 25.04 from this Ubuntu 24.10 X1E concept image install. Upgrading from Ubuntu 24.10 to Ubuntu 25.04 had worked out and yielded a bootable/working system, unlike with trying to carry out a clean Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 installation.