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I'm not sure that the standard socket is so important. I don't remember ever changing the CPU on a motherboard: by the time significantly better CPUs are available, they need a different socket.

An AArch64 desktop could be built in the same way that the Raspberry Pi was built, just with a higher spec CPU and more connectors.

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You're right about the socket, but the problem is that every chip/board basically needs a custom bootloader - you can't just plug in a USB stick with a Debian AArch64 installer and go to town, you need a custom packaged blob from the vendor, which usually comes with their own blessed Linux distribution (e.g. Raspbian), and you're out of luck if that doesn't meet your needs.

If this model works for you, then yeah, a Raspberry Pi or a similar board could work. I've been hearing pretty great things about the new Pinebook Pro laptop.

Anything that requires binary blobs just to boot seems fishy. You'd think one driver per chipset would be sufficient, and it should be open source.

I suppose in the AMD/Intel world, all these binary blobs are built into UEFI.

Totally agree! You'd think that vendors would agree too, since it makes it strictly easier for engineers to use their chips and design them into higher value products.

Doesn't UEFI also support aarch64? Why can't vendors use that?

Windows 10 requires UEFI support, so any ARM device that supports Windows 10 uses UEFI.

Hey, that's wonderful. What I had read before pointed to every device having some weird undocumented mess.

But: Is the bootloader even unlockable to install alternative software?

> But: Is the bootloader even unlockable to install alternative software?

IIRC, MS require the device to support Secure Boot, but whether or not you can disable it or whether you can add other signing keys is undefined (and I have no idea what vendors do). (Originally the requirement was it must be always enabled and only the OEM could add keys, but that has since changed.)

There's a port of Ubuntu available. It isn't yet complete but it does boot on Windows on Arm devices.

https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/linux

All ARM Servers need to be SBBR compliant. Which means UEFI+ACPI so each Linux distro just boots and works.

SBC market is completely different thing. But that blog post was not about them.

In addition to the custom bootloader mentioned above, this would require significantly more SKUs. Many combinations of motherboard and CPU in use at the moment would probably not even make it to market.

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