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A PC = x86_64 + UEFI. They are have a lot of standard components. You can take any Linux boot USB and boot almost any PC with it and at least get a console if n

A PC = x86_64 + UEFI. They are have a lot of standard components. You can take any Linux boot USB and boot almost any PC with it and at least get a console if nothing else. A PlayStation 4 is x86_64 but is NOT a PC. Watch the Fail0ver video on their PS4 kernel port to understand how different it is. ARM is a god damn clusterfuck of random pins soldered to random shit and every Android kernel patched to hell in non-upstreamable ways. Look at all the work PostmarketOS has to do in order to get mainline Linux to work on all the random ARM e-waste out there. DeviceTree is a joke. Microsoft at least forces ARM+UEFI, but they have locked bootloaders and even though people have found exploits to unlock them, there's virtually no reversed engineered drivers. All those hundreds of thousands of Lumina phones? Now they're e-waste. Worthless. Linux grew because IBM created the PC. Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS and everyone started making compatibles. Over time, BIOS and later UEFI became solid standards. ARM may be fast, but the non-standard Basic Input/Output and device detection makes it nothing but potential e-waste.

kube-system 6y ago
Devil's advocate: anything that says Compaq on it is probably e-waste anyway, standards notwithstanding. Being standards-compliant isn't enough to save a machine from the landfill by itself; if those machines can't keep up with users' expectations, they too will end up discarded. Most devices that people throw away are "serviceable" machines. The people who rescue old hardware with linux and put it back into service are extreme outliers.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  I used Compaq in my example because they were the first company to reverse engineer and IBM bios through some legal slight of hand (one group reverse engineered the entire BIOS and wrote a spec, an entirely different group re-implemented that spec, and the first PC compatible was born). I wasn't commenting on the quality of the brand at all.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    I know why you picked it, and I wasn’t commenting on the quality either. (I loved Compaqs when I was young) I’m just saying that dumpsters are already full of old computers that could run Linux, but people aren’t doing it. They’re tossing the old Windows Vista laptop in the trash and buying whatever is on sale at Best Buy this week.
easde 6y ago
Hardly any of this matters in userspace or device-independent kernel modules, which is what 99% of developers work in.

kube-system 6y ago

Devil's advocate: anything that says Compaq on it is probably e-waste anyway, standards notwithstanding. Being standards-compliant isn't enough to save a machine from the landfill by itself; if those machines can't keep up with users' expectations, they too will end up discarded. Most devices that people throw away are "serviceable" machines. The people who rescue old hardware with linux and put it back into service are extreme outliers.

djsumdog 6y ago
I used Compaq in my example because they were the first company to reverse engineer and IBM bios through some legal slight of hand (one group reverse engineered the entire BIOS and wrote a spec, an entirely different group re-implemented that spec, and the first PC compatible was born). I wasn't commenting on the quality of the brand at all.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I know why you picked it, and I wasn’t commenting on the quality either. (I loved Compaqs when I was young) I’m just saying that dumpsters are already full of old computers that could run Linux, but people aren’t doing it. They’re tossing the old Windows Vista laptop in the trash and buying whatever is on sale at Best Buy this week.

easde 6y ago

Hardly any of this matters in userspace or device-independent kernel modules, which is what 99% of developers work in.