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), 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.
I don’t want PCs to be like smartphones. I don’t want locked bootloaders.
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but since Microsoft made TPMmandatory for Windows 11+, locked down bootloader are on their way.
Basically, TPM allows (Windows) software to validate/verify the integrity of the OS and hardware. This also (could) include the bootloader/bios if Microsoft chooses to do so.
TPM is the equivalent of attestation on Android, which is the exact reason why your Banking App won’t work on your rooted/custom Android Phone.
That being said, we should embrace ARM. X86/AMD has 30+ years worth of “history” baked into each ( CISC) chip. This complexity is why your PC draws soooo much power and generates soooo much heat.
Tbh I really want to get my hands on a snapdragon X laptop at some point just to play around with it. The energy efficiency alone makes me very curious.
I was under the impression that most of the issues around getting Linux to work on them was around driver support. As in: people are absolutely able to install an arbitrary OS, but the functionality is just super janky in most cases. Is that not accurate?
You’re definitely right in terms of arbitrary OS installation, some folks have got Ubuntu running on Lenovo snapdragon laptops recently.
The lack of “portability” though is a bit troubling, it seems each device (tree) has to be manually added, developed, tested, and have an install image created for it, unless I’m missing something. And this will be arduous and potentially problematic for corner cases or small numbers of adopters of a particular machine model (so basically the same as right now I guess).
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.
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.
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’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), 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.
I would like RISC-V to also get ‘good enough’, considering that it seems to be a shitton more open than ARM is.
As a simple user of Linux, I totally understand what it means for me…less choice, more google-android-like shit hardware. No thanks 👍.
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but since Microsoft made TPM mandatory for Windows 11+, locked down bootloader are on their way.
Basically, TPM allows (Windows) software to validate/verify the integrity of the OS and hardware. This also (could) include the bootloader/bios if Microsoft chooses to do so.
TPM is the equivalent of attestation on Android, which is the exact reason why your Banking App won’t work on your rooted/custom Android Phone.
That being said, we should embrace ARM. X86/AMD has 30+ years worth of “history” baked into each ( CISC) chip. This complexity is why your PC draws soooo much power and generates soooo much heat.
Raspberry Pi owners: 🙄
“usually”
I am a raspberry pi owner. And a pinephone owner.
And even on those very open devices, booting alternate OSes is less straightforward than on x86.
This! Exactly!
Standardized firmware isn’t something that’s specified in the ISA, is it? It’s just shitty phone manufacturers.
Asus had some x86 phones a few years back. I haven’t dug into them, but I doubt they had a full bios/efi.
pine64 arm devices have u-boot, while a bootloader does fullfil a subset of the uefi spec.
Tbh I really want to get my hands on a snapdragon X laptop at some point just to play around with it. The energy efficiency alone makes me very curious.
I was under the impression that most of the issues around getting Linux to work on them was around driver support. As in: people are absolutely able to install an arbitrary OS, but the functionality is just super janky in most cases. Is that not accurate?
You’re definitely right in terms of arbitrary OS installation, some folks have got Ubuntu running on Lenovo snapdragon laptops recently.
The lack of “portability” though is a bit troubling, it seems each device (tree) has to be manually added, developed, tested, and have an install image created for it, unless I’m missing something. And this will be arduous and potentially problematic for corner cases or small numbers of adopters of a particular machine model (so basically the same as right now I guess).
I think that there’s a legitimate place for all-in-one “smartphone” SoC PCs. You can make them cheaper, smaller, and use less power.
It’s just not really what I want for myself in a PC. I want the modularity and third-parties competing to provide components.
But I am pretty sure that there are plenty of people who don’t care about that.
There has to be enough scale to support products like that, though. SoC systems might cannibalize enough to make scale hard.
sigh
Well, we’ll see where things go.
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.
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.