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> They're also working on getting Linux on the mainline kernel... This was my first question, and there's no answer in their FAQ. Thank you for answering it.
by rlpb 9y ago
> They're also working on getting Linux on the mainline kernel...
This was my first question, and there's no answer in their FAQ. Thank you for answering it.
I used a Samsung ARM Chromebook as my main laptop for many years, running Ubuntu. I only stopped two weeks ago when the keyboard finally broke (it did very well for how much it cost).
The biggest problem I had was that driver support didn't appear in the mainline kernel for years. When it finally did all work, it regressed regularly. I gave up bisecting the regressions to keep my own laptop running; I seemed to be the only one doing it.
Now I won't touch any ARM hardware (or any hardware, for that matter) that apparently supports Linux unless everything I need is already in mainline. Otherwise, by the time it lands (if it lands), it seems to be that there won't be enough of a user community left to keep it from regressing.
- prophesi 9y agoYeah, that's the biggest issue with ARM. It doesn't matter what the specs are if the driver's don't work. The reason Raspberry Pi is so great is because of its huge community support to iron out all of its issues. There are plenty of SoC's out there with a lot of wasted potential because of their lack of support, and the fact that vendors only give you binary blobs for critical system drivers... Thankfully, Pine64 has had a decent community these past two years so I'm not terribly afraid of the Pinebook getting left in the dust. But it's still a gamble.