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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

My Raspberry Pi does almost all things that I would like to do with a computer. I could definitely imagine buying an ARM based computer.

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Because we have the sources for most of the software, it can be recompiled.

Not true for Windows, especially old closed source software.

Apple switched processors several times. They provided an emulator for old programs, so they could run without the user noticing anything (except worse performance). You could probably do the same for ARM.

And Windows has done the same thing for ARM. I think it was posted here in the last month or so.

Edit: found it,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14318406

It's worth understanding the Mac software ecosystem is mostly made up of people who love the platform and OS.

Windows just isn't the same, lots of devs making software the same way the made it 15+ years ago and not wanting or even caring enough to change no matter what the benefits.

also, apple do a really good job on compilers etc to make it easier to write code and systems that jump between systems quite well. Lots of people dev on windows without using the latest tools from Microsoft this is just not how it works with apple.

Doesn't that make this an argument against closed source, not against ARM?

I agree the issues are related, but if us people in open source can switch in an afternoon and you people in closed sourced land can't ever switch it highlights a problem.

If the windows ecosystem magically switched to the OSS repo model then ARM would become instantly viable to the maximum extent, no doubt about it.

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