If the manufacturers had, y’know, provided the information needed for drivers without requiring ginormous amounts of money to be paid in, the support would be there by now. Without it, there’s an inevitable reverse engineering catch-up period.
Plus, the article was evaluating Debian, which tends to be conservative when updating packages. I’d expect support to become available in other distros first. Hmmm . . . Here we go. Someone’s got Gentoo running on one, with a note saying “sound, bluetooth and camera still need work (on 6.12.4 kernel)” (Gentoo ARM hardware list, under “Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (Snapdragon)”). So the situation is not even nearly as bad as the Phoronix article suggests—it boots, but some drivers for the peripherals aren’t quite there yet.
IDK man. If your hardware doesn’t work on the stock kernels + firmware + etc, I don’t feel like it’s the distro makers’ problem to make some extra changes to try to make it work.
If they want to to make a smoother experience for their users (which is a common Ubuntu thing), then great. But they’re not “supposed” to.
I feel like I have to disagree with the title and arrangement of the article as these Linux distros have been around for quite a longer time period than Snapdragon X hardware.
At this point I feel that it’s part of the hardware’s manufacturers responsibility to pay and work with the distro developers to get the desired distros working on their new hardware especially since most distros just work on x86_64 laptops nowadays.
Windows is doing Linux a solid here by requiring ACPI on ARM. Kind of surprising that Linux doesn’t support it.
