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I agree with Mr. Geerling here. I very much wish to see an "open" ARM system, and I want it to be competitive with at least the Apple M1. Unfortunately, due to

I agree with Mr. Geerling here. I very much wish to see an "open" ARM system, and I want it to be competitive with at least the Apple M1. Unfortunately, due to poor driver support, this ain't that. ARM has had a bad fragmentation problem, and I fear that this will be even worse with RISC-V. For those wanting really open systems with decent drivers, it would appear that x86 or the RPi are really the only options.

ninth_ant 1y ago
Fragmentation is only one of the problems. The bigger problem is that these devices are still largely toys for hobbyists. This isn’t an insult… I’m one of them, I have a variety of fun little arm and riscv boards. Lack of mainline kernel support and other standards will hamper their widespread adoption. But as the market matures and shows real commercial potential this will start to be financially worthwhile for the vendors to address. So your assessment is correct for today’s market. But with China being hammered by the trade war, it’s all but certain their industry will accelerate their efforts to have fully domestic tech solutions — and the same will be true of Europe and other parts the world as well. All it takes is one of them to embrace standards to get more commercial success, and then the others will copy and chase them.