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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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I'm conflicted on ARM.
The additional competition is great, but it presents a great risk of PCs becoming more locked down. They don't have an open, standardised BIOS/UEFI like x86 systems do.
Booting alternate OSes on ARM systems can be a nightmare. Usually it's straight up not possible.
I don't want PCs to be like smartphones. I don't want locked bootloaders.
EDIT:
FFS people. I know there are some ARM devices that allow booting of non-official OSes. That's why I said usually.
Even for those devices though, they typically have to use non-standardised firmware (you can't just take an OS for device A and use it for device B in the same way you can take an .iso and install it on any x86 machine), and it requires the OEM to want the device to be open.
Your desire to go "umm ackshully..." and be technically correct over a point I never made in the first place is blinding you to the point I was actually making: x86 is fairly open, standardised, and modular by default. ARM isn't. And all it takes is a look at the phone/tablet market to see that OEMs don't want them to be.
I worry, and I don't think unreasonably, that ARM becoming the standard could mean a further erosion of the openness of PCs.
Not all ARM chips are in phones, nor are they all locked down like one. There are several ARM devices and SBCs now where switching OSes is as easy as swapping out an SD card. Most do use uboot as a standard and some are even capable of utilizing UEFI.
But it's not standard.
What made PCs take off was the BIOS war, which occurred because manufacturers were dependent on 3rd party OS's, which were still competing for dominance.
Where can I watch or read about this? Like what can I Google for more?
Some SBCs only boot from said SD card though, while some do support more robust media. However, too many images are presuming you boot from SD which is a pita.
With or without Das Uboot, they still rely on board specific firmware (even Uboot is customised for many boards to make it work). OSes that state they do support aarch64, often require to have UEFI on your system so no way they are gonna boot on e.g. your Raspberry Pi.
Add to that, that is unlikely that browsers compiled for arm64 will have feature parity with their x86-64 counterparts. Goodbye Digitale Rights Management, and with that goodbye services like Tidal or Spotify (unless you run an OS that is still supported by their apps).
I was gonna say I thought Raspi was ARM.