Dell’s XPS 13 9345, one of the most prominent Windows on Arm laptops built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor, has been drawing attention for all the wrong reasons in the Linux community. A firmware issue tied to the laptop’s embedded controller is preventing proper suspend and thermal management under Linux, and the fix — which Dell has apparently developed — remains locked behind a Windows-only update mechanism. The situation has become a flashpoint for broader frustrations about firmware distribution, Arm-based laptop support, and the gap between what hardware vendors promise and what they actually deliver to non-Windows users.
The core problem, as reported by Phoronix, centers on the embedded controller (EC) firmware in the XPS 13 9345. The EC handles low-level hardware functions including fan control, power management, and suspend-resume behavior. Under Linux, users have reported that the laptop fails to properly enter or exit suspend states, and that thermal management doesn’t function correctly — leading to excessive heat and reduced battery life. These aren’t minor annoyances. They’re fundamental usability issues that make the machine difficult to run as a daily Linux driver.
What makes this especially frustrating is that Dell apparently has a firmware update that addresses the problem. But the update is distributed exclusively through Dell’s Windows-based firmware update tools. There’s no option to apply it via the BIOS setup interface, a bootable USB utility, or the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) — the standard mechanism that dozens of hardware makers use to push firmware to Linux machines.
LVFS, managed by Red Hat engineer Richard Hughes, has become the de facto standard for firmware delivery on Linux. Lenovo, HP, and even Dell itself use it for many of their products. But not, apparently, for the XPS 13 9345’s embedded controller. The omission is conspicuous.
The Snapdragon X Elite platform has been a major push for both Qualcomm and its OEM partners. Qualcomm has positioned the chip as a legitimate competitor to Apple’s M-series silicon, promising strong performance per watt and native Arm efficiency for Windows. Microsoft has backed the effort heavily, and the initial wave of Snapdragon X Elite laptops — from Dell, Lenovo, HP, Samsung, and others — launched in mid-2024 with significant marketing fanfare. But the Linux story on these machines has been rocky from the start.
Upstream kernel support for the Snapdragon X1E80100 platform (the specific chip designation) has been progressing, with Qualcomm engineers contributing patches to the mainline Linux kernel. Display, storage, USB, and basic platform support have landed in recent kernel releases. Suspend support, however, has been a persistent weak point — and it turns out that some of the blame lies not with the kernel or Qualcomm’s drivers but with the firmware running on Dell’s embedded controller.
This isn’t a new pattern. Firmware has long been the hidden obstacle for Linux on laptops. The operating system can have perfect driver support, but if the firmware underneath assumes Windows-specific ACPI behavior or exposes bugs that only manifest outside of Microsoft’s software stack, users hit a wall. And when the fix exists but can’t be installed without booting Windows, it creates a chicken-and-egg problem that’s maddening for anyone who bought the hardware specifically to run Linux.
Discussion on X and in Linux community forums has been pointed. Several users have noted that Dell markets the XPS line as a premium product and has historically offered Ubuntu as a factory option on some XPS models through its “Project Sputnik” initiative. The expectation, reasonably, is that Dell would maintain at least a baseline level of Linux firmware support across the XPS lineup. The XPS 13 9345’s situation suggests that the Snapdragon X Elite models didn’t receive the same attention.
Dell has not publicly commented in detail on when or whether the EC firmware update will be made available through LVFS or any other Linux-compatible channel. The company’s support pages for the XPS 13 9345 list BIOS updates but the critical EC firmware fix remains Windows-only as of this writing.
There’s a broader context here that matters. The Arm laptop transition is still in its early innings, and every stumble like this reinforces the perception that Arm-based Windows machines are hostile territory for Linux. That perception may not be entirely fair — Qualcomm has invested real engineering resources in upstream Linux support, and the Snapdragon X Elite’s mainline kernel story is significantly better than previous Qualcomm laptop platforms. But firmware distribution is a supply chain and policy problem, not just a technical one, and it requires OEMs to actively participate.
Some in the community have resorted to workarounds. One approach involves using a Windows installation — even a temporary one on a USB drive — solely to apply the firmware update, then wiping it and returning to Linux. It works. But it’s the kind of hack that shouldn’t be necessary in 2025, especially on a machine from a vendor that claims to support Linux.
The LVFS infrastructure is there. The tooling is mature. Dozens of vendors participate. Dell itself participates for other products. The missing piece is a decision — someone at Dell deciding that the XPS 13 9345’s EC firmware should be packaged and uploaded to LVFS. That’s not a technical barrier. It’s an organizational one.
And that’s what makes this story significant beyond the specifics of one laptop model. It’s a test case for whether the Arm laptop wave will repeat the mistakes of the early UEFI era, when Linux users routinely found themselves locked out of firmware updates and BIOS features that vendors only tested with Windows. The tools to avoid that repetition exist now. The question is whether vendors will use them.
For anyone considering the XPS 13 9345 as a Linux machine today, the practical advice is straightforward: check whether Dell has released a Linux-compatible EC firmware update before purchasing, and be prepared to jump through hoops if it hasn’t. The laptop’s hardware is capable. The kernel support is improving rapidly. But firmware remains the bottleneck — a solvable problem that no one at Dell has apparently prioritized solving.
The Linux community has learned, through long experience, that hardware support is only as good as the firmware underneath it. Dell knows this too. Whether the company acts on that knowledge for the XPS 13 9345 will say a lot about how seriously it takes its Linux users going forward.
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