Acer Aspire 16 AI audio support is merged for the next Omarchy, still untested on the laptop

Owners of the Snapdragon-powered Acer Aspire 16 AI (A16-11M) have had no sound at all under Omarchy. Two pull requests by Birk Skyum, merged on November 11, 2026, set out to fix that with speakers, headset and microphone support coming in the next version. One big caveat up front: according to the PR, the support is “not tested on the laptop yet.”

The plumbing lands in omacom/omarchy-pkgs#2565. Its description explains that the laptop’s device tree had no sound card, there was no UCM profile for it, and linux-firmware carried no topology under its name, because audio was left out when the tree was added “because nothing had been tested.” Since then, GenericCPU has brought audio up on their own A16-11M, with speakers, headset and lid microphones working, and the new packages build on that work.

Here is what changes on the package side, according to the PR:

• linux-omarchy-dtbs 7.3-9 adds patch 0006, which gives the laptop a sound card wired like the ThinkBook 16’s, which has the same parts: two WSA8845 speaker amplifiers, a WCD9385 headset codec and the lid microphones. It also covers DisplayPort audio on both USB-C ports and HDMI.
• alsa-ucm-conf ships GenericCPU’s UCM profile, matched on the laptop’s DMI. The speaker amplifiers run at PA Volume 6 instead of the ThinkPad T14s’s 12, since there is no Acer tuning for them.
• A new acer-aspire-16-ai-audio package builds Linaro’s ThinkPad T14s topology under the card’s name, X1P42100-ACER-Aspire-16-AI, and the build checks it byte for byte against linux-firmware’s X1E80100-Romulus-tplg.bin, the file GenericCPU tested.

That topology package is the key piece: without it, the card never registers. omacom/omarchy#18544 makes Omarchy install acer-aspire-16-ai-audio automatically on Snapdragon machines whose DMI product name is Aspire A16-11M, the same way the ProArt PZ13’s speaker setup is handled. Existing installs get it through migration 1794432305, which asks for a reboot, and the package is listed in omarchy-other.packages so the ISO carries it too.

On testing, both PRs are upfront. The hardware quirks test passes in an aarch64 Arch container, and the packages build there, but nothing has been booted on the A16-11M itself. The Omarchy PR says GenericCPU “will test it with the package build,” so treat this as promising rather than confirmed until that report comes in.

It fits the bigger Snapdragon push. DHH wrote on X on November 9, 2026 that the original X1 Snapdragon PCs “are still very capable and shockingly energy efficient,” adding: “We’ll soon have the entire range covered with Omarchy.” Getting audio onto the Aspire 16 AI is one more step toward that, from Birk Skyum, who joined Omarchy Core to lead the Snapdragon rollout.

Source: https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/pull/18544