Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinfrankel | Hacker News Reader

> I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen

IMO ARM linux is great, the real thing lacking is good hardware to run it.

Yeah, I tried out a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop replacement and pretty much everything is supported except for proprietary stuff like games.

Eh... that was not my experience: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...

(Unless you're speaking almost entirely of webapps, which mostly run fine even on the measly 1.5 GHz 4-core Pi ARM processor.)

I think most of the gripes described are really issues that come from moving from a MacOS desktop to try a Linux desktop; if you were moving from a x86 Linux desktop to the Pi the experience would have been much less painful.

You are stating in step #2 that the Pi4 cannot output 4k at 60Hz. Could you please insert a footnote that it actually can?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/hdmi...

I meant everything that runs on x86 Linux. Of course iMovie and Adobe stuff doesn't work, lol.

I had an ARM Chromebook for a while (around 2016) that I customized with a 256GB SD card and Linux Mint. The software all worked well, but the WiFi card died after a year and effectively bricked the damn thing. Cross-compiling might be an issue, but that's not a primary use case.

You mean all the Android handsets? The history of Linux on ARM is colorful, full of corporate missteps and giant brands (namely HTC and to lesser extent Samsung) that were created from that.

None of them come close to the performance Apple achieves on their chips.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com