Qualcomm hiring one of Red Hat's top x86_64 Linux laptop experts last year, Hans de Goede, is indeed having a positive benefit on enhancing the Fedora Linux support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered hardware.

Hans de Goede initially worked on improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 experience for Fedora 44 earlier this year. Now with Fedora 45 due out for release in October, the Snapdragon X1 experience will be more polished.

Thanks to more Qualcomm Snapdragon X support reaching the mainline kernel and various distribution-level enhancements managed by Hans, it should be "a much smoother experience" for those wanting to try out a Snapdragon X1 laptop with the upcoming Fedora 45 AArch64 images. Though he noted that a few workarounds may still be needed for some hardware.

Hans also wrote in today's blog post that while Snapdragon X2 support has begun reaching the mainline kernel, Fedora 45 using the Linux 7.2 kernel out-of-the-box means that the X1 Plus/Elite laptops support is where it's at with X2 coming more into play with future kernel versions.

I'll work on some Snapdragon X1 Fedora 45 benchmarks soon if it works well on my Acer Swift 14 AI laptop (SF14-11T-X3RZ) test hardware compared to the Ubuntu AArch64 images.