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TunaOS on Snapdragon X Elite laptops — daily-driver Linux on the X13s

· 2 min read
James Reilly
James Reilly
Maintainer

Snapdragon X Elite is the most interesting Windows-on-ARM silicon in years — and a growing number of Linux users are discovering that these laptops make excellent Linux machines. TunaOS ships two images built for the canonical X Elite device, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s (Qualcomm SC8280XP): one based on Bonito (Fedora Atomic GNOME) and one based on Project Bluefin Dakota.

Two variants, one goal: a daily-driver ARM laptop​

VariantBaseStatusDownload
bonito-x13sBonito (Fedora Atomic GNOME)Live ISO, auto-rebuilt on pushbonito-x13s-latest.iso
dakota-x13sProject Bluefin DakotaAlpha — tracks upstream dakotax13s-live-latest.iso

Both ship the X13s support stack out of the box: the jlinton/x13s COPR kernel enablement, Qualcomm firmware (qcom-firmware), Bluetooth (bluez), power management (pd-mapper), and battery monitor firmware blobs in the initrd — with the required kernel arguments (arm64.nopauth, clk_ignore_unused, pd_ignore_unused, modprobe.blacklist=qcom_q6v5_pas) and device tree preconfigured.

Try it​

  1. Write the ISO to a USB stick (dd or your usual tool) and boot to the live desktop
  2. Install from the live environment
  3. Already running bootc on the X13s? Switch in one command:
sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/tuna-os/bonito-x13s:latest
sudo reboot

Updates are atomic from then on: sudo bootc upgrade, rollback on failure, verified by the same container-native pipeline as every TunaOS image.

Why now​

The X13s is the reference device for Linux on Windows-on-ARM laptops, and the Qualcomm Linux story keeps accelerating. TunaOS's manifest-driven build pipeline makes it cheap to maintain per-device images — the X13s variants are rebuilt automatically on every push to main, so the ISO you download is the latest verified boot image, not a snapshot from release day.

Get involved​