I'm looking at two #ARM devices sitting on my dresser, both tablets.

One is a locked-down piece of garbage, designed to be a locked-down piece of garbage. I regret buying it, because its utility is obscured by the horrible software stack on it, but it was stupidly cheap, an easy fire-and-forget purchasing decision.

The other is a lovely piece of open hardware, designed for openness, designed for linux. It was graciously sent to me by a #fedifriend last year. It is sadly out of support from the distro that supported it, and is basically stuck at nearly 10-year-old software versions without any path for an upgrade, unless I do some insane skill levelling-up and do an ARM #LFS on it, or something else nearly as hacky.

Both devices are sadly useless to me, even though one was designed to be a closed surveillance helldevice, and the other an open platform.

This is because ARM sucks. It has always sucked, and it will always suck. There are no open hardware interface standards, no easy way to address the hardware with FOSS drivers, and even when you do have FOSS software for it, it rarely finds its way upstream. The hardware itself is inspired, but the software/firmware/driver stack is utterly Kafkaesque.

I'm not going to belittle folks who get Apple Silicon devices to run linux on them, nor would I ever besmirch the heroic, herculean efforts of the #Asahi team to get linux working on that hardware, but please never forget that those are herculean efforts, and should they ever cease, your hardware support is dead in the water.

As for me, I'd rather have a thermal-belching, potato-performant Intel Atom-based brickphone than a sleek, battery-sipping, crazy-performant ARM laptop. 😅