Comment by NaomiLehman
6 days ago
for this to happen we would need to see a second company that controls both the hardware and the software and that's not realistic, economically. You can't just jump into that space.
6 days ago
for this to happen we would need to see a second company that controls both the hardware and the software and that's not realistic, economically. You can't just jump into that space.
You could argue that is exactly what Tuxedo is doing. In this case, they could not provide the end-user experience they wanted with this hardware so they moved on.
System76 may be an even better example as they now control their software stack more deeply (COSMIC).
when I say "control the software" what i mean is we need another company that can say "hey we are moving to architecture X because we think it's better" and within a year most developers rewrite their apps for the new arch - because it's worth it for them
there needs to be a huge healthy ecosystem/economic incentive.
it's all about the software for end users. I don't care what brand it is or OS and how much it costs. I want to have the most polished software and I want to have it on release day.
Right now, it's Apple.
Microsoft tries to do this but is held back by the need for backward compatibility (enterprise adoption), and Google cannot do this because of Android fragmentation. I don't think anyone is even near to try this with Linux.
Open Source has a massive advantage here.
Almost everything on regular Fedora works on Ashai Fedora out of the box on Apple Silicon.
You can get a full Ubuntu distribution for RISC-V with tens of thousands of packages working today.
Many Linux users would have little trouble changing architectures. For Linux, the issue is booting and drivers.
What you say is true for proprietary software of course. But there is FEX to run x86 software on ARM and Felix86 to run it on RISC-V. These work like Rosetta. Many Windows games run this way for example.
The majority of Android apps ship as Dalvik bytecode and should not care about the arch. Anything using native code is going to require porting though. That includes many games I imagine.
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Microsoft with their Surface line? They don't control every part of the hardware, but neither did Apple control even the majority before the M series.