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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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I'm all for ARM and having thin laptops / tablets running full desktop Linux... however it's going to be a pain, there's a LOT of X86_64 software out there that is hard to get running on ARM with decent performance. And some of those things can't get ported.
Besides that the ARM ecosystem is a fucking mess of companies who don't want to implement a generic UEFI thus you'll never get generic support from OSes like there is on x86. I believe this this is the defining moment of ARM, when the CPU makers actually make UEFI a requirement and we no longer have to do the hacks and nonsenses we see on SBCs to get those CPUs running.
The good part about Linux is that the ecosystem pretty much Foss. You can just compile it for arm. Debian already does this.
That was Mac when the M1 dropped, buy their problem is most of the stuff isn't open source and one has to wait for the publisher to recompile on an ARM device. I expect a bunch of software to just be recompiled remotely or locally if you have such a distro (Gentoo, Arch, NixOS,...) and not even notice a difference.
A lot of stuff already has ARM builds because of the raspberry pi. Many docker images have ARM versions too.
This isn't going to be the clusterfuck it was on Malus chips, except for maybe gaming because it's in the same place. Asahi Linux is dealing with that right now too (donating can help).
Anti Commercial-AI license
My other answer here: https://lemmy.world/comment/10549598
Dealing with legacy software is a huge problem for Windows. I feel like it is a much smaller problem for Linux.
Gamers will certainly be hit. But a lot of the workload in games is the GPU of course, which can be native.
What other ARM software are you thinking of?
Anything proprietary will face issues, games being the more obvious one. And you’ll also run into the issue that a lot Linux users do virtualize Windows from time to time and that’s gonna be harder and worse.
To be frank that’s not my main concern here. It’s the fact that ARM vendors aren’t supporting UEFI and that’s a mess that people usually don’t think about. Right now you’ve kernel tweaks to support the boot specifics and low level shenanigans of ARM-xyz.
This a problem, there’s much more brands developing ARM chips and boards nowadays than we ever had with intel/amd and the PC vendors were still kind of forced into adopting a unified interface. It’s not feasible to make the OS support hundreds of specific boards and their details. I just hope that Microsoft forces Qualcomm into baking in a proper UEFI so other brands will follow and we finally can treat ARM based stuff as mostly generic systems.
😏dual cpu gaming PC armX86 Edition?
SystemReady is already a thing. When it becomes mandatory for design wins hopefully it will become more common place.
There will be some growing pains, but the x86 compatibility layers are getting surprisingly good. Personally, other than Steam, I don't have any software this is incompatible with ARM.