I know it. I’m literally typing this on a Raspberry Pi. I used to run Arch Linux on it, but Arch Linux on ARM has severe issues. It’ll literally go months with no package updates.
One day I’ll get brave and switch it to Gentoo. Just need to put together a build server first.
SteamOS on the Frame may soon alleviate some of those woes, given it’s based on Arch and has an ARM processor iirc. Can’t hurt, anyhow.
Usually those are from python rebuilds which clog the other packages for weeks at a time. Maybe they could use your build server.
I have had great success running NixOS on my Pi. You can build software on your main computer and remote deploy with SSH :)
Does the cross compilation work fine? I’ve had some issues in the past building on macOS for x64.
Which compiler?
It’s been a while. I can’t even really remember which language. Now that I think of it, it might have been C#.
I want to quit my day job so I can focus on ARM power mode support in Linux
ARM is kinda lacking the hardware to motivate developers, I think. Raspberry Pi generally has good support for server stuff, but I don’t think you could really justify desktop use before maybe 2019 (release of rpi 4 with much faster CPU and more RAM), and Android devices are generally really locked down.
Never mind the absolute ocean of ARM SoCs, not to mention Apple’s silicon
Those SoCs usually have one distro with a patched out of date kernel and overall lacking support of upstream drivers to install an off the shelf distro.
Arm devices are notoriously closed. Apple silicon is an extreme example, where it only works thanks to reverse engineering the HW.
What we need are more ARM PCs with UEFI and mainline Linux drivers. That way they would run a generic OS image just like an x86 PC.
Most ARM PCs require an image built specifically for that system. That makes them a real pain the ass to work with.
This is why I gave up on a really amazing ARM device that I wanted to use as a router. I ended up having to buy a mini PC simply because I didn’t have the time to invest more time in burning random disk images to SD cards and USB flash drives.
And each of these SoCs requires people, ideally the manufacturer, to actually put in the work to make the hardware work on Linux. So many SBCs with severely outdated kernels …
I suppose ARM really missed the mark by not establishing a universal power framework.
I wonder if my PC counts as low end by now. I reckon I got a few more years until then.
Gamers think everything without a dedicated GPU is low end. I play games on Intel HD from 2018. Most work tolerably. I’m not switching until my laptop falls apart or it becomes fully obsolete (to slow to do my productivity tasks).
It has a hyperthreaded quad-core. While it has less than half of the benchmark scores of modern PCs, it’s still better than any used laptops you could get under 300€ (looking at you EU used hardware taxes (also, the taxes conveniently avoid the US … How did that happen)).
Every config is a low end config on an infinite time scale, haha.
Hand to God I wish I got into Linux 6 years ago before I bought my current gaming laptop. I would have been perfectly glad to keep rocking my old Lenovo, I loved that little beast of a laptop.
TBH most day-to-day stuff still works well on my 12yo mid-tier laptop. I feel pretty good about upgrading its RAM from 8 to 16 last year, mostly to keep up with my multi-tab webbrowsing habits.
Yup, i have a mid 2012 mbp with linux mint xfce and it runs great. My biggest complaint is the hardware support. Had to add a usb wifi dongle because broadcom chip was constantly dropping and the sleep wake takes forever and sometimes it wont sleep. But otherwise runs like a champ. I do kinda wish it would die so i could get a laptop without the sleep/wake issues.
I run a 1 year newer mbp with fedora and my main drag is standby voltage. Even if the laptop is shutdown the battery will drain (batt 2 yrs old). Other than that, it still does everything you could possibly ask of it.
dat ssd is doing a lot of the liftin here hehe
Even without the SSD the things only really slow down when you’re booting or loading up an application for the first time. Linux’s RAM caching is really nice.
Yeah bro 12yo refurbished MSI laptop with Mint+Plasma keeps chugging along
I pretty much only make it do documents and YouTube but still
