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A comment on What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Machine?. Parent comment

Re:What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Mach... by robotnikman on Monday October 27, 2025 @02:52PM (#45724848)
>At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions?

Somewhat related, but if x86 loses dominance it will be even more difficult if not impossible to install Linux or other alternate OS's on ARM devices. The majority of consumer ARM electronics make it hard enough, and normally requires you to run a specific patched (and most likely outdated) Linux kernel in order to boot.

There are ARM devices which meet the ARM System Ready standard which allows you to boot whatever OS you want, but they are mostly enterprise devices such as servers. Cheapest one I've seen which your average consumer might buy was an ARM workstation with a starting price of about $1500

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Re:What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Mach... by rini17 on Monday October 27, 2025 @02:54PM (#45724868)
Raspberry Pi and clones/alikes are ARM devices with perfect Linux support.
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Re:What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Mach... by bigfatkitten on Monday October 27, 2025 @04:10PM (#45725693)
Raspberry Pi is one of the least open platforms around.

Broadcom SOCs preferred by Raspberry Pi require proprietary blobs to function, and much of their functionality is buried under a mountain of NDAs.

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Re:What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Mach... by Rohansi on Monday October 27, 2025 @04:24PM (#45725836)
That's the current norm for GPUs, no? The Raspberry Pi just happens to use a SoC where the GPU is the primary processor. I wouldn't say it's worse - it's maybe slightly better but still close to par.
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