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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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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 in the same way you can take an .iso and install it on any x86 machine), 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.