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Comment by realgeniushere | Hacker News Reader

Unrealistic and unfair expectations here. Microsoft isn’t doing anything to stop you from booting other OSes on this device. OpenBSD devs did the work, so OpenBSD boots on it. Linux devs now need to do the same if they want to support this dev kit. Not Microsoft’s problem.

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>OpenBSD devs did the work

It doesn't appear they did anything specific for this kit, nothing obvious in the changelog anyway. Perhaps just some combination of things they've done for other UEFI bootable Arm64 hardware. OpenBSD arm64 uses u-boot, so also maybe just some support that was already there.

Okay. Anyway, OpenBSD works, proving that there’s nothing stopping Linux from working except the time and interest of Linux developers. I’m sure they are interested and the necessary modifications will be made soon enough.

Embedded-looking systems usually need an FDT blob for booting Linux, this seems to be the missing piece according to the article. It shouldn't be hard to provide it on the hardware developer's end, while a bit more complicated to infer from the OS developer side.

And yet, somehow, OpenBSD works just fine already. Perhaps relatedly, this device is UEFI based, so unlike most ARM devices, it has a standard boot process and hardware enumeration mechanism.

The article seems like less a critique and more of an informational report of this person's experience.

>Whilst I enjoy this kind of tinkering, it was disappointing that a "Dev Kit", built for developers can neither boot Linux, nor enable a custom Linux Kernel for WSL2.

What's that I hear Hacker News and Reddit cry? "It's a Dev Kit for Windows, you moron!" That may be the case, but Microsoft "Loves Linux", and clearly has worked hard to make WSL2 available out of the box on these devices.

It’s not a scathing attack or anything, but it is in fact critical of Microsoft.

Fair enough, but those were a couple sentences out of a multipage article. I just get tired of comments for any article that involves Microsoft in some way turning into generic arguments over whether people should like or hate Microsoft, overshadowing the actual content of the article. The arguments tend to rehash the same tropes over and over and are pretty tedious and not interesting.

But I guess I'm just adding to the problem by turning it into an equally tedious meta-argument. I'll stop now ...

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