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With the caveat that ARM isn't a industry standard like PC has become, thus while propritary OSes can thrive, FOSS has a much higher challenge other than OEM specific distros or downstream forks.

Stuff like this, https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Microsoft-Corporation/dp/15723171...

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There are the Arm SystemReady and ServerReady requirements/specifications that enable generic board support by the OSes.

Thanks, I thought we were still on device trees and little else.

Practically speaking, very few systems actually support SystemReady. There's an experimental port of edk2 for the Raspberry Pi, but some hardware is unavailable when using it.

The ARM server platforms seem quite decent here? But yeah, pick any small dev board and I suspect it looks quite different.

It's weird that the book is titled "PC98", because PC-98 usually refers to NEC's line of x86 but not IBM PC compatible computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98

Which I think reinforces your argument: there were non-standard x86 platforms, but thankfully they died out. Given the situation of the home computer industry during the 8 and 16-bit eras, it is a small miracle that we ended up having an open industry standard.

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