Snapdragon X + Ubuntu Linux 25.04: Living the Dream? (Premium)

With the release of Ubuntu 25.04 last week, I decided it was time to take a fresh look at what is arguably the most popular Linux distribution in the world. This would be a multistep immersion, starting with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). And it would happen on my favorite laptop, the Snapdragon X-based Surface Laptop 7 running Windows 11 on Arm.

I downloaded Ubuntu 25.04 twice while I was writing the news post on Friday, both times specifically for Arm64. The first was the ISO, for a later install in virtual machine (VM) form using Hyper-V and, if/when I was feeling particularly lucky, maybe even natively in dual-boot form. And then also a separate download for WSL.

Or so I thought. The second download was still for the year-old Ubuntu 24.04 and not the latest release, I later discovered. But that was OK, I thought. I needed to install WSL anyway, and I figured I could then install Ubuntu and, if needed, upgrade that to 25.04.

Well, that was what I needed. And also what I could not do.

? Ubuntu Linux in WSL

Installing WSL works the same as always: The easiest method is to install it from the Microsoft Store and then install the distribution(s) you wish to use, either from the Store or directly from the command line. I installed Ubuntu using the latter approach, but the Store link would have worked just as well. Or maybe I should say just as poorly, since that gave me 24.04 too, and not 25.04. Time to upgrade.

Or, more to the point, time to figure out how to upgrade.

As it turns out, WSL only install or upgrades to LTS (long-term support) versions of Linux by default, and Ubuntu 25.04 isn’t an LTS release. I found that first bit out–I already knew it wasn’t an LTS release–by running the following command in Ubuntu:

sudo do-release-upgrade

Which told me:

Checking for a new Ubuntu release There is no development version of an LTS available. To upgrade to the latest non-LTS development release set Prompt=normal in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades.

Fine. I will cut to the chase by telling you that trying to open that file with Notepad works fine, but that saving it does not.

A few minutes with Google told me I would need to change the permissions on the file and–blah, blah, blah–whatever. Linux remains a miracle of friendly user experiences, especially from the command line. Long story short, I made the change, edited the file, changed the permissions back and started fresh.

Back to the drawing board. Er, the command line.

The following command will ensure that all the installed packages are up-to-date (after typing in the admin password).

sudo apt update

And then this will upgrade all the packages in one pass.

sudo apt upgrade

So, surely by this point I was on 25.04. But running the command wsl.exe -l indicated that I was still on 24.04. Or, at least that the name of the distribution within WSL was still Ubuntu-24.04.

So I restarted WSL. Nothing. Re-running Ubuntu, this time I brought out the big guns.

sudo do-release-upgrade

The results here were promising: It found Linux 24.10, the LTS release from last October.

I recall reading somewhere that you might need to install interim updates before getting the latest release, so I went through with this upgrade. It took a while, but in the end, it upgraded to Ubuntu 24.10. Good. But when I tried the same release upgrade command as before, Ubuntu told me there was no new release found. This was the end of the road.

I restarted WSL again. I rebooted. But this is as far as I can get.

So that was that. Obviously, this is mostly fine: You can do just about anything one would reasonably want to do with Ubuntu in Windows 11/WSL using 24.10 (or 24.04). You can run command line and even GUI apps–I experimented briefly with gedit, for example–and the cross-platform file system access works in both directions.

But I wanted more.

? Ubuntu Linux virtually

I knew that the ISO I’d downloaded was the correct version of Ubuntu, at least. And while I am really interested in what the dual-bool configuration looks like, I’m in Oaxaca, Mexico as I write this, and I only have this one laptop with me. So screwing it up isn’t an option … yet. And that’s fine. The next step is to install Ubuntu 25.04 virtually. And for that, one can use Hyper-V.

Well, I can, anyway. Surface Laptop 7 comes with Windows 11 Home, not Pro, and Hyper-V is exclusive to the latter. But that’s fine: I used one of those Windows 11 product keys that some are irrationally worried about–see the comments if you’re morbidly curious about what being wrong for no good reason looks like–to upgrade my Surface Laptop 7 to Windows 11 Pro months ago, and without issue then or since then despite two PC resets. But I had to install that first. You do that, as always, using the Windows Features control panel. And then you reboot.

After launching Hyper-V, I created a new VM using a Generation 2 VM, 4096 MB of RAM (with Dynamic Memory enabled), the default networking switch, and the default VHD size and location. And I chose the downloaded Ubuntu 25.04 ISO as the installation source. And then I connected to and started the VM. And … nothing happened.

This triggered a memory. So I turned off the VM and looked at its security settings. And then I saw it: Secure Boot was enabled, which is fine, but the template was set to “Microsoft Windows.” So I switched that to “Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority,” saved it, and restarted the VM. Voila.

From there, I choose “Try or Install Ubuntu” so that it would boot into the live Ubuntu environment. Which it did.

Ubuntu Linux Setup is similar enough to Windows 11 Setup that it shouldn’t throw anyone off. There are screens for choosing the language, accessibility, keyboard layout, and Internet connectivity (which is optional, by the way), and then you reach the Install/Try screen.

I choose to install it and was then presented with more screens, in this case to choose install type (interactive for me, but there is an unattended version, too), apps to install (basic or extended, I went with the latter), optional proprietary software for graphics, Wi-Fi, and media (yes to all that), how to install Ubuntu (disk layout, basically), encryption (no, not for a VM), and then account creation and time zone. And then it was off to the races.

And that didn’t take long. In less than 10 minutes, I was told the installation was complete. I just had to reboot to complete the process.

And there you go. From there, it was a quick sign-in and a welcome screen, and that was that. Ubuntu Linux 25.04, running in a VM on Windows 11 on Arm using a PC with a Snapdragon X processor.

I will experiment a bit with Ubuntu 25.04 this way, of course. But now I’m curious if even more is possible in the form of a physical installation of this system, in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 11, naturally.

But not until I get back.