If this could be a solid docker host, it would be a really interesting home server. It still cannot six months later and instead I am building a home K8s cluster with Dell Micro 3060s with i5-8500t CPUs. My per unit cost with 64GB RAM, 1TB NVME, and 2.5Gbe is under $310.
99% of their uses are for appliances/phones, so it makes sense that they're still totally immature at being a computer. But weighed against how much time arm has had to try to improve their world, looking at how plodding progress has been, how broadly chaotic & grossly inconsistent the ecosystem is, it's still a stunning testament.
Computing in general could have been this bad. It's such a miracle we got the PC. The Gang of Nine just wanted to sell hardware but they launched a major Democratizing phase change, one we still have yet to see reproduced.
That hasn’t existed in ARM land. Seems to be the wild west in comparison. So every board requires custom bring-up.
Just looking at the 1980's there were tons of operating systems being created & getting used. That there could be so many OSes was part & parcel to it suddenly being possible to create so much hardware.
I see this as a time of diversification & enablement, a great opportunity, that yes, latter Microsoft did emerge top of the heap on. But they were more incidental a player than anything else, in my mind; they rode the wave that was happening. And they contributed very little. DOS with TSR driver stuff wasn't exactly a place for cooperation; it too was wild west.
They didn’t cause it initially, but they sure took advantage of being the thing IBM chose.
If you're looking for a free Unix-y environment to play with, with >11000 binaries packages available.
You need to use the mini-DisplayPort for video output, not Type-C. This is a UEFI limitation on the machine.
The hardware is simply not competitive at the price, even if you ignore the hassles of hardware support.
The N100 is interesting, but it's capped at 16GB RAM by Intel.