I’ve seen people talking about it and experienced it myself with a server, but why does Linux run so well on ARM (especially compared to Windows)?
Windows’s achilles heel is arguably its chief benefit - legacy compatibility and being the de facto platform for applications.
Back when I had a Surface RT, I thought it was awfully neat, ARM-compiled versions of Office, IE, Windows 8.x bits ran well and it was fanless with fine battery life. (although I surely sound weird, I had a Windows Phone back then too and the syncing with IE on both was a nice feature) It’s just they were pushing the Store then and if you jailbroke it, ARM applications were rare.
Apple is a pro at architecture transitions and can steer the whole ship, MS can put Windows on ARM all they want but OEM’s will be reluctant since it’ll be a relatively big risk to sell a “Windows, buuut…” computer and the popular closed-source applications probably won’t bother with ARM for a while
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Raspberry pi works fine with linux, cutiePi also. my iomega nas is an arm board running debian…i don’t see the issue
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The issue with Arm is they aren’t all one board/chip, you have ARM based design licenced from them and they are built to meet the criteria of what the customer requires. i.e. for my iomega NAS there isn’t firmware boot, you just have to generate an empty section of 00s on the first 32bytes of the drive so the board knows that is the drive to load the kernel from (no grub no uboot) and the board is set to do the rest from the next partition.
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But all x86 instructions are the same right, thus why it doesnt matter what era your chip is from or what manufacturer, arm can be very different
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I don’t think it’s just Linux. I’ve been told MacOS also works very well on ARM. Maybe it’s just Microsoft doing a bad job.
Well MacOS is because of a controlled ecosystem/hardware and a really good emulator, but IDK about Linux
Also yes Windows on ARM is a steaming pile of garbage
Also yes Windows on ARM is a steaming pile of garbage
Not just on ARM. Windows is and will always be a proprietary steaming pile of shit, no matter what architecture. That will be the case as long as Microsoft develops it.
Linux, and much of the open-source software that goes with it, has been multi-architecture for a long time. If you take something that already runs pretty decently on x86, x86_64, PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, and Intel Itanium CPUs, porting it to yet another architecture is, while not trivial, at least mostly a known problem.
Windows, by contrast, was built for descendants of the Intel 8088, period. It’s unsurprising that porting it is a hard problem and that results aren’t always satisfactory.
(Apple built on top of a modified BSD kernel, and BSD has also been ported around quite a bit, so they also have a ports-are-a-known-problem advantage.)
Linux runs well on practically every CPU architecture.
But why though?
Because it’s not developed by some corporate fuckers whose only goal it is to make as much money as possible, it’s developed by individual skilled people in their free time, because they’re passionate. They don’t want to sell some garbage, they genuinely want to make a good operating system for themselves and everyone else to freely use without any restrictions. FOSS is not about the money, it’s about actually creating something good.
