As someone who used to have a Windows on Arm device. It was Hell. Basically anything that isn’t Lenovo or from Microsoft will mean it’ll eventually brick itself unless you steal drivers from other laptops. You also cannot reinstall the operating system because most of these nuggets have no device tree files in the firmware of the machine minus a few lenovo thinkpads. So that means when you try to reinstall windows there is a high likelihood your touchpad and keyboard and USB ports don’t work. I literally snapped the motherboard on my poor Samsung Galaxy Book Go in half over it suddenly bricking itself. After a Windows update that I could not recover from.
Anyway if you want a decent windows on arm laptop buy lenovo and replace the storage. They have replacable nvmes usually. Also don’t get the 8 gigabytes of ram versions you literally will have programs just refuse or just force close themselves out of existence. You will literally have to debloat windows upto even removing Windows Defender and stopping most background services and disabling sysmain because it’s broken. You’d also have to disable certain things in Windows defender like memory protection if you want things to work right.
Keep in mind though most web browsers as well that aren’t Microsoft Edge will have rendering issues on older snapdragon socs.
You know if you really wanna rock the most powerful CPUs out thereonly to end up breaking it and using your 2017 spectre. Even if its like literally 10 times slower because atleast it just works.
So it makes me wonder how much Valve is paying them for support since the upcoming Steam Frame uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 CPU and is also running Steam OS which is just a fork of Arch.
This is about Snapdragon X1 Elite, not Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. These two are completely different from each other on a support perspektiv, even if they share a lot of architecture.
Lastly, when it comes down to device by device, they can have vastly different glue logic (hardware), so I guess we will wait and see for device by device. But it would be cool seeing a raspberry like 8 elite gen 5 board, for hopefully cheap (it won’t be cheap in this artificially inflated market, angry face)
Can’t say I’m surprised given how much Qualcomm has prioritized Windows over Linux support for years now.
And when you see how bad their windows support is it’s a miracle anyone buys this garbage.
It’s a neat concept. But at the moment only Apple has pulled it off well. And that’s only if you stick with Mac OS.
As someone who used to have a Windows on Arm device. It was Hell. Basically anything that isn’t Lenovo or from Microsoft will mean it’ll eventually brick itself unless you steal drivers from other laptops. You also cannot reinstall the operating system because most of these nuggets have no device tree files in the firmware of the machine minus a few lenovo thinkpads. So that means when you try to reinstall windows there is a high likelihood your touchpad and keyboard and USB ports don’t work. I literally snapped the motherboard on my poor Samsung Galaxy Book Go in half over it suddenly bricking itself. After a Windows update that I could not recover from.
Anyway if you want a decent windows on arm laptop buy lenovo and replace the storage. They have replacable nvmes usually. Also don’t get the 8 gigabytes of ram versions you literally will have programs just refuse or just force close themselves out of existence. You will literally have to debloat windows upto even removing Windows Defender and stopping most background services and disabling sysmain because it’s broken. You’d also have to disable certain things in Windows defender like memory protection if you want things to work right.
Also https://armrepo.ver.lt/ Is a god send for finding arm windows software.
Keep in mind though most web browsers as well that aren’t Microsoft Edge will have rendering issues on older snapdragon socs.
You know if you really wanna rock the most powerful CPUs out thereonly to end up breaking it and using your 2017 spectre. Even if its like literally 10 times slower because atleast it just works.
I legit have trauma over this.
So it makes me wonder how much Valve is paying them for support since the upcoming Steam Frame uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 CPU and is also running Steam OS which is just a fork of Arch.
Valve is paying for FOSS support https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html
This is about Snapdragon X1 Elite, not Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. These two are completely different from each other on a support perspektiv, even if they share a lot of architecture.
The 8 Elite Gen 5, I don’t know the status on Linux, but Qualcomm has a few day old blog post talking about what they have upstreamed for day 1 support into the Linux kernel https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2025/10/same-day-snapdragon-8-elite-gen-5-upstream-linux-support
Lastly, when it comes down to device by device, they can have vastly different glue logic (hardware), so I guess we will wait and see for device by device. But it would be cool seeing a raspberry like 8 elite gen 5 board, for hopefully cheap (it won’t be cheap in this artificially inflated market, angry face)