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Comment by Loudergood | Hacker News Reader

Android is another famous example.

Historically speaking, between average Android device and average Chromebook, latter is far easier to get mainline kernel + "normal" Linux distro running, e.g: 8 Chromebooks vs. only 1 Android device (and even that is a dev. board) in official Arch supported hardware list:

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms

Alas, new Chromebooks are no more. "Successor" Googlebooks are all Android.

So Arch on ARM is basically limited to an SoC with at most 8GB of RAM? It looks like we are still very far from a mainstream ARM motherboard with a socketed CPU, upgradable RAM and support for discrete GPUs. Until then, I see no reason to move away from x86.

> in official Arch supported hardware list:

ALARM isn't official Arch, so this also isn't an "official Arch supported hardware list". Arch is currently still only x86_64 and everything else is at best unofficial if not just straight up unaffiliated.

(do note that this might change soon-ish™ considering [0], but I think they want to first get their automated build infrastructure ready)

[0]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests...

As is WebOS, Raspberry PI, Beagle Boards, netbooks, PS2Linux, PS3 OtherOS,....

Regular OEMs will never give their differentiation factor freely.

Even Linux OEMs like Tuxedo apparently cannot get access to hardware specifications, and have to reverse engineer their own devices.

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