Are they actually upstreaming anything or just "debian and ubuntu support™" where its just two random images they supply like sbc manufacturers usually do?
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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In their blog post, they elaborate:
The first priority is upstreaming the drivers that unlock real workloads, including Qualcomm Hexagon NPU support through fastRPC for on-device AI inference and GPU support through Freedreno , Turnip and Rusticl the open-source Mesa drivers for Qualcomm Adreno graphics and compute. ... Out-of-tree patches may help early bring-up, but mainline support is what distribution maintainers and long-term developers can build on across kernel releases.
As much as I welcome this I can't help but wonder, why do they care?
Is it because it was the year of the Linux desktop? ;D
Same reason NVIDIA finally started prioritising open source drivers for linux all of a sudden... Its AI :/. The laptops are even called copilot+ PCs. They wanna make AI dev for those data centers that keep popping up as easy as possible. Thats literally the only reason.
If I had to guess, it would be to have an easier time getting intoe the server market.
Being able to develop on the same platform as the one that a program is deployed to usually allows for much lower friction and faster development cycles.
It can also be used to ramp up collaboration with the Linux project, which is useful for getting patches upstreames promptly.
Windows didn’t do well on these and they want to expand the market I guess
They got to get rid of those chips...
They may not have done well fiscally however I’ve been using a Lenovo ARM64 desktop and laptop for quite a while and my only pain points are the horrible, awful, type 4 printer support and having to hack around to get the shittastic VMware remote console (VMRC) to install.
AI, same thing why nvidia kinda went a bit loosy with their drivers on linux, windows is too limiting and freeBSD is apple's main bitch.
apple has nevee meaningfully contributed to BSDs, they are just a disgusting leech, the reason why FreeBSD isnt as big is simply because Linux won the Unix wars that strongly
they are just a disgusting leech
yea thats what i want to say as well
How do you figure FreeBSD is influenced by Apple? macOS and iOS don't use FreeBSD. They use Darwin, which is a BSD fork, but not related to FreeBSD at all AFAIK besides they have some of the userland tools.
influenced? in coding mostly not, but darwin is based on older bsds including freebsd that has been impacful for macOS (and meta btw, freebsd not darwin) since it has the major development throughout compared to others eg. openstep (and they dont like copyleft licenses embedded on linux).
Apple has also been found rebasing openbsd codes as thiers.
As someone who works for a company that develops FreeBSD kernel code, your doing an awful lot of conflating between BSDs. You're basically saying that ChromeOS and Fedora are the same because they use the Linux kernel.
you know what? thats fair. my bad on going full nutso and for not recognizing that linux basically does the same thing.
All good homie
Fantastic.
3 years late, but I guess it wouldn't be Qualcomm without a helping of disappointment.
Late indeed but with the Frame already shipped running Arch and KDE on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 it's definitely going to be interesting.
Qualcomm wants a piece of Nvidia's server market pie.
I expect the "support" is to ship some binary blobs in a open source wrapper at most, like Nvidia does.
I was interested years ago potentially of a tablet form factor as a nice travel device
Don’t think I care anymore
I thought it was in issue with Linux not supporting Qualcomm chips, not the other way around
Linux didn’t support the chips because Qualcomm hadn’t released what was needed to do so. They didn’t make the necessary drivers, nor released what was needed for someone in the community to make it for them. Same issue Nvidia cards have had with Linux.
It’s not anything about Linux that makes it incompatible, but the companies are unwilling by to provide support and unwilling to let anyone else do it for them due to being protective of their proprietary firmware.
Ah thanks for clearing things up. I never looked in to it too deep and am really really excited about this