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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm did this in 2024. They pushed some patches to LKML, and issued a press release to brag about it. (https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...)

Yet 2 days ago, Tuxedo Computers announced they were abandoning Qualcomm due to crap support. (https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/tuxedo_axes_arm_lapto...).

  In particular, the long battery runtimes – usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices – were not achieved under Linux. 
  A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control.
  Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates.
  Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support.

There is nothing in this press release to suggest they've changed.

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Interestingly, Valve hired Igalia to reverse engineer (successfully) Qualcomm's shit for their upcoming VR headset.

Isn't Tuxedo jus a white label reseller?

White label reseller isn't really the right term. They don't design most of their components and buy them wholesale, but they do assemble them and most relevant to this particular comment thread, they do a lot of the device firmware and support stuff.

It's exactly the stuff that they actually do themselves that Qualcomm has been making very hard.

>Yet 2 days ago, Tuxedo Computers announced they were abandoning Qualcomm due to crap support. (

Does Apple offer better support? Qualcomm offers commercial support. I guess Tuuxedo Computers didn't pay for the support?

Apple is a non-sequitur. Tuuxedo is giving up on Qualcomm in favor of AMD and Intel.

Do AMD and Intel require Tuuxedo to pay for premium support in order to get working Linux drivers? No, of course not.

Qualcomm's support for Linux is embarrassing when you compare it to pretty much any processor manufacturer except Apple.

Apple doesn't actively lock and act hostile towards the reverse engineering folks. They just do their thing and sometimes do small jests to allow these folks to boot anything they want and play with the hardware.

...and while they're standing away from GPL stuff, they do have a dedicated site for Open Source software: https://opensource.apple.com/

Go to releases, and see what they do there.

if you are in the business of buying parts, assembling them, and selling the assembly under your brand (as tuxedo and others like them are), then Apple is a indeed not an option. Their chips might be the best, but you still can only get them in Apple devices, in the specs Apple provides and with no official support for any OS beside macOS / iOS.

That's true. What I wanted to point out is the fact that the most tightly integrated and arguably the most locked down platform on the market is more open than a platform designed to be adapted by others and sold by many.

I don't expect any daily-driveable alternative operating systems on Apple systems since it's a continuously moving target, yet Apple doesn't have a such heavy-handed approach. They just do their thing and do not hinder things actively like NVIDIA and Qualcomm.

This comparison makes no sense. It's desktops/laptops vs phones. In either case Apple is the worst offender. You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs, or install other OSes on iPhone.

> You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs

afaik you technically can, except that m1/m2 force pcie bars to be mapped as device memory (forbids unaligned r/w), so most gpu software (and drivers) that just issue memcpys to vram and expect the fabric to behave sanely will sigbus. it's possible to work around this, and some people indeed have with amdgpu, but it'd absolutely destroy performance to fix in the general case

so it doesn't really have anything to do with apple themselves blocking it but rather a niche implementation detail of the AS platform that's essentially an erratum

You would think Apple would update this or put out another support page supporting what you're saying: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102363

There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM.

I think this is more than just an erratum, even with newer chips. It's monopolistic behavior all too common nowadays.

don't see why they would care to put out docs on it considering macos doesn't even permit kexts anymore, there'd be no gpu drivers anyways. i figured it was obvious we're talking in the context of running linux on these things, given the parent topic.

> There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM

can you link to this? my intuition is that they're speaking on whether apple would include dgpus inside AS systems like they used to with nvidia and amd chips in macbooks, which i agree wouldn't make much sense atp

There were uses for DGPUs in MacOS before AS, those uses could have continued, but Apple left no choice. It's weird how continuity wasn't as important to Apple in this case.

Whatever kernel or hardware facilities are available to Apple's own GPU driver, should be available to other GPU drivers. Anything else is myopic thinking, which I realize might be common for Apple, but it is also monopolistic.

Linux also allows userspace drivers with less performance I think, but I don't think DGPU use can be made performant because of AS hardware choices.

I am predisposed to ignoring link requests for things that can be easily googled.

Your expectations are so comically low that I hold you in direct contempt as a user of "Hacker" News.

I would not make ad-hominem attacks to people who I don’t know anything about.

Macs have an open bootloader that allows users to run an unsigned OS like Asahi Linux (without having it degrade security when you do boot MacOS).

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