Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

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> Running Linux on powerpc, arm, amd64, I get the exact same experience across the board as x86 bar platform-specific bits like openfirmware/efi tools.

This is demonstrably not true, there are plenty of ports that end up being Intel-only, and plenty of architectures that involve some sacrifice in terms of software choice if you want to run them. (as a SPARC and Raspberry Pi user I could elaborate, but hopefully you get the idea) Not that there's anything wrong with that.

> Until Microsoft start building and providing every binary as a native build, and providing the tooling for others to do the same, they will remain wedded to x86, and I'll be unable to take their support for other platforms seriously.

What you take seriously is your business, but the standard you're holding Microsoft to is one Linux doesn't meet, let alone BSD, and it's completely arbitrary regardless. If their ARM platform does what it needs to do, it doesn't especially matter if it offers support for (for example) legacy Windows cruft.

> There are plenty of ports that end up being Intel-only .. as a SPARC and Raspberry Pi user

Sure, but you can compile failed builds of software yourself and get that tool on ARM or SPARC. ARM works pretty well on Debian, so long as your not on Raspbian & using their ancient repos with broken software. Part of why I've avoided Raspberry Pis entirely.

A good point, but their repos are so eccentric because Debian refused to support the RPi's older ARM architecture and the RPi community had to roll their own. That speaks to the original point of this subthread, I believe. Not only does Linux not offer the "exact same experience across the board," it cannot even do it for the ARM architecture. For decent enough reasons, really, when you think about it.

Different versions of the ARM architecture with different ABIs. From the Debian POV that's a separate architecture to support. It could have been done by Debian, but was done by a third party, just as other minor platforms are supported.

I don't agree that it has a "different experience" because the tools and infrastructure are there to build the entire distribution from scratch. And this was done. I've done it myself several times. Once done, this architecture variant had the complete package set available for all the official supported architectures, bar any architecture-specific packages being added/omitted. Third parties can and do bootstrap and maintain entire architectures. I can't speak for the raspbian people and their port, but it's not hard to manually bootstrap the kernel and toolchain and then set an autobuilder loose on the entire source archive.

And that's the point I was trying to make about Windows; that's exactly what you can't obtain. Be it the old NT ports or the present day ones, outside the base "Windows" release and some key products, the rest of Microsoft's product portfolio is largely missing.

Yeah, it sounds like we're talking more about the difference between the limitations of open source and closed source than any particular failure on Microsoft's part to meet the expectations of its customers.

I don't think they're going to really square the circle in the way linux can, having everything available because everything is open source. On the other hand, it's not inconceivable they could end up with a server platform that does offer an awful lot of Microsoft stuff as open source, which also makes available all the linux userland stuff you'd want to have. Their handicap might be that not enough of their infrastructure software has made it to .net yet, but they've shown lately that they're willing to do some porting when it's appropriate. (Sql server!)

Only a select few boards were based on ARMv6, the Raspi 2 and above use a modern ARMv7 core. Running Raspbian vs Debian on a Raspi 2 or 3 shows off the massive performance gap between the two, IMO they should have used a single ARMv7 core from the get go.

But the Raspberry Pi is a fundamentally flawed platform, with poor I/O, binary blobs required to make the hardware function, and a community that is toxic towards free software, with its own vaguely supported distro.

An OrangePi Zero ($7) or OrangePi PC Plus ($22) will blow a Raspi out of the water any day, due to each USB port and the ethernet port being directly wired into the SOC, allowing 40MB/s per port. Plus, I can run kernel 4.10 and mainline Debian on it without any blobs, and the only things I'll miss out on are GPU support & WiFi. The VPU has been reverse engineered though, so H.264 & H.265 video works well.

> community that is toxic towards free software

I think that's a hostile mischaracterisation of the community!

Isn't that more a case of no support promised, none given. Rather than support promised but falling short.

It's close to two decades now but I don't recall Microsoft promising that all the NT architectures would offer the exact same experience. It would have been silly then, and it would be doubly silly now that plenty of the stuff in Windows is legacy cruft.

Pretty much, Debian moved forward to recompiling for ARMv7 as it netted significant performance improvements, and if you wanted ARMv6 binaries you could compile them yourself. Raspbian did this, but not very well.

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