At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I've been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite SoC to see how its performing under Linux now and against the AMD/Intel competition. Unfortunately, it's regressed even further than the last round of testing.

Prior to the clean install of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on this Acer Swift SFG-1401 laptop I first booted back into the Windows 11 on ARM partition to update the operating system, including the drivers and BIOS/firmware to ensure everything was up-to-date now for mid 2026. After that, I booted the generic Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ARM64 desktop image and was off to carrying out a clean install of Ubuntu 26.04 on this Snapdragon X Elite. Besides a select very few Snapdragon X configurations like from Lenovo and Dell, you still need to maintain the Windows 11 partition in order for Linux to extract the necessary firmware files for use by the Linux drviers. It's just with the select Dell XPS 13 9345 and the Lenovo ThinkPad where the vendors have upstreamed the firmware binaries to linux-firmware.git for making a pleasant out-of-the-box firmware experience.

After the Ubuntu 26.04 clean install, the first thing I did once booted was knowing the "qcom-firmware-extract" dance so Ubuntu can fetch the firmware files from the Windows partition as needed for the GPU and other components. But to much surprise, qcom-firmware-extract on Ubuntu 26.04 was reporting "error: Device is currently not supported"... This took me by surprise considering for the past year I have been routinely testing this Acer laptop on Ubuntu and it's been one of the early models supported by qcom-firmware-extract. Trying to specify the Windows partition and other steps were to no avail in getting qcom-firmware-extract working on this laptop.

Then I noticed Ubuntu 26.04 is using qcom-firmware-extract version 17 where as version 20 is available in the Ubuntu 26.10 development archive. So I grabbed that updated qcom-firmware-extract_20_arm64.deb binary and it installed fine on Ubuntu 26.04. When using that newer version, the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop once again detected and the utility was able to grab the needed binaries from the Windows 11 partition.

After a reboot, I was surprised to find that LLVMpipe software accelerated graphics were still in use rather than the actual Qualcomm Adreno GPU with the X1 Elite.

Well, looking at the dmesg kernel output, the MSM DRM driver was loading the firmware files but there were errors on GPU hardware initialization. Earlier Linux kernel versions had worked fine with this laptop but the Linux 7.0 kernel shipped by Ubuntu 26.04 was now hitting these MSM DRM errors.

Going back to last year with the early Snapdragon X Elite bring-up for Ubuntu, there was the Ubuntu Concept X1E PPA for providing customized packages for bettering the hardware support for these devices. As of writing the Ubuntu Concept X Elite PPA for 26.04 (Resolute) hasn't been updated since April with its linux-qcom-x1e kernel variant at 7.0.0-32.32. In any case I decided to enable the PPA and install the linux-qcom-x1e kernel to see if it would help the situation, even though it's from April and out-of-date compared to all the security fixes and the like that have come to the Ubuntu 26.04 kernel since launch.

But even still, no go.

Considering the Adreno GPU was previously working fine on Ubuntu 25.04/25.10 and the like on the very sample laptop, sad to see the graphics support now regressed for at least this laptop model. And that's after dealing with the chore of getting qcom-firmware-extract working to even get the necessary firmware files in the first place.

Battery monitoring and the like also not working. On the plus side, at times with earlier Ubuntu builds on this laptop it would randomly reset/shutdown due to presumed thermal/power issues under heavy load. With my testing on Ubuntu 26.04 this behavior wasn't happening.

But let's see how the Snapdragon X1 Elite CPU performance is at least looking on Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0 compared to other AMD Ryzen and Intel Core laptops also tested on Ubuntu 26.04.