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I'm pretty fearful of the death of x86 because it probably implies the death of easily accessible hardware for general purpose computing. If I go to a big box s

I'm pretty fearful of the death of x86 because it probably implies the death of easily accessible hardware for general purpose computing. If I go to a big box store and buy any AMD or Intel laptop I can throw whatever kernel and userspace I want on it in a few minutes. The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. If x86 dies we will wind up with a bunch of devices where step 1 is "run this code to exploit a buffer overflow to bypass the locked bootloader. Only works on v1.2 PCB revision 7"

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. ? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.
- janice1999 2y ago
  That is not necessarily true, especially for older Chrombooks. Distros like GalliumOS existed for a reason - many Chromebooks needed drivers not available upstream for things like touchpads. Not all have UEFI Firmware support either. There is a great resource though for people who want to boot regular Linux - MrChromebox[1]. [1] https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    It's true that you'd need drivers for your hardware, but that's not really special; I own plenty of normal x86 PCs with hardware that Linux doesn't have drivers for. That said, AIUI Google is generally pretty good at pushing drivers upstream these days. And the aftermarket UEFI is a great thing - it means that Chromebooks are probably the easiest+cheapest way to have a coreboot machine - but you don't actually need that; the default firmware will, in developer mode, boot any properly-formed image, which is a touch annoying but does in fact let you boot any OS that handles that boot system without replacing the firmware. One of my main machines right now is an ARM chromebook that runs postmarketos on the stock firmware.
    - sidewndr46 2y ago
      What hardware does Linux not have drivers for? I'm not counting WiFi cards connected via USB or PCI-E slots. Those don't have anything to do with x86. Also the reason why those commonly don't work is because the underlying hardware is crap.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

> The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. ? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.

janice1999 2y ago
That is not necessarily true, especially for older Chrombooks. Distros like GalliumOS existed for a reason - many Chromebooks needed drivers not available upstream for things like touchpads. Not all have UEFI Firmware support either. There is a great resource though for people who want to boot regular Linux - MrChromebox[1]. [1] https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  It's true that you'd need drivers for your hardware, but that's not really special; I own plenty of normal x86 PCs with hardware that Linux doesn't have drivers for. That said, AIUI Google is generally pretty good at pushing drivers upstream these days. And the aftermarket UEFI is a great thing - it means that Chromebooks are probably the easiest+cheapest way to have a coreboot machine - but you don't actually need that; the default firmware will, in developer mode, boot any properly-formed image, which is a touch annoying but does in fact let you boot any OS that handles that boot system without replacing the firmware. One of my main machines right now is an ARM chromebook that runs postmarketos on the stock firmware.
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    What hardware does Linux not have drivers for? I'm not counting WiFi cards connected via USB or PCI-E slots. Those don't have anything to do with x86. Also the reason why those commonly don't work is because the underlying hardware is crap.