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Comment by ezst | Hacker News Reader

And how exactly does that matter? How close do you have your head to x86 assembly for the instructions set to matter?

ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.

There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.

It's an Acorn microcomputer, I know this!

What makes you think if one ARM manufacturer gets popular ‘clones’ won’t pop-up again?

One key frustration is it’s typically not possible to have an arm distribution that boots across most arm boards, because they have incompatible boot loaders. Ie you have a raspberry pi image and a banana pi image and an orange pi image and the rock pi S image that are all different from each other. There have been some attempts at UEFI on arm that would address this, but it’s nowhere near as consistent or compatible as on the x86 platform side.

People bought IBM clones to run the same software, not for the love of the architecture.

If ARM processors are regularly incompatible and segmented, we all lose out and end up in isolated silos.

A computer is much more than an CPU chip, e.g. "PC 99 System Design Guide", among several other references.

But that's not answering my question? What do you expect to get from today's ARM chips that's fundamentally impossible otherwise? And how is that a step forward?

I know I will never switch to ARM willingly. There is no advantage, only vendor lock-in. I feel that x86's openness was an accident, and we should try to keep x86 alive as long as possible.

It actually was an accident, enabled by IBM using off the self parts unlike their previous computers, and Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the BIOS.

Again, a computer isn't a chip with nothing else.

In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.

The comment you're replying to is implying that in an ARM world nothing is standard, portable, or compatible by default. Think about smartphones: Every single one a bespoke board with bespoke hardware.

In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.

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