And in many ways that probably is true. But it's not uninform. There's a lot of places where Qualcomm is clearly working very hard to get upstream, to get mainline support. https://www.phoronix.com/search/Qualcomm

I was super impressed with their work offloading sound to a USB sound card, to let the CPU sleep more. Really wild subsystem to build. And they did it! Kept at it! Really cool stuff to have in the kernel.

They've hired some good people for GPU support, which is rad. I feel like Qualcomm is so so close to having a great system people can genuinely love. But there's always some missing pieces, it's always an end result that is far far far quirkier and more difficult than a PC would be. Some of the other comments in this thread give me some hope that there is a more normal boot chain here at least, that it's other troubles. But it's hard. And Qualcomm only has so much power over what their OEM partners actually build.

Qualcomm is the only name in wifi right now for OpenWRT like systems. MediaTek looks good, is present too, but supposedly their drivers are just a total garbage fire, buggy & crash tastic beyond words.

I think it's important we reassess our old biases. And give some credit where due. Qualcomm has an absolutely forsaken reputation & their lawyerliness is a thing of legend, forbidding as heck. But there are also a lot of signs that at least some of the company is tired of making chips that are utterly unsupportable, and has some real drive towards good open source support. Thank you, warriors of light there.

Really hoping we see some Linux running Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme units in the next 12 months. Looks like an amazing system! Good job engineering the new cores ya'll!! Amazing performance.