I hope this was just a mistake and done due to other reasons (they thought these were fake RPis?)
The difference is mostly that PCs have decades of history of having an openly documented abstraction layer below which all the proprietary stuff is piled on, so it looks more open than the RPi which makes all the proprietary stuff more obvious and in your face.
Among ARM SBCs, the RPi used to be one of the least open ones. These days things are slightly better. It's still not great, but it's also hard to find alternatives that are much better. Nvidia Tegra boards are pretty good; you can run those with fully open source firmware these days, at least the X1 (the last bit missing was the DDR4 training code, but that's been reverse engineered now). It's still hard to get all the pieces working with "clean" open code though.
I have an RPi4, tried kodi (libreelec OS) and vlc on raspbian, both apps stutter with most videos at 1080p. Luckily I repurposed it for IOT so I'm pretty happy with it.
Hardware decoders tend to be picky about the exact video format. VLC wants to work with anything, which also makes it not a good idea to use the hardware decoders.
Even Chrome on Linux doesn't use hardware acceleration on any GPU for video.
This is such a strangely obvious lie that it's hard to imagine why you would write it.
I'm not a hater AT ALL.
Proprietary bootloader technology that Broadcom maintains is secret stopped the community hacking together USB boot, keeping us tied to bloody MicroSD cards and all the palava which is adherent to that. Proprietary GFX hardware which needs paid for codes to use (see comment earlier about Malaysia).
Everybody should buy one or more, but Broadcom do have control over their chips to a greater degree than I'm personally happy with.
> Proprietary bootloader technology that Broadcom maintains is secret stopped the community hacking together USB boot, keeping us tied to bloody MicroSD cards and all the palava which is adherent to that.
I get that you don't like this stuff you're complaining about. If you sincerely think this is any worse than the situation with "regular PCs," go look for the disk that came with your PC with the source code for your BIOS ROM.
(This is an aggravating one, since there are plenty of PCs in the world that could use a microcode patch via the BIOS right now)
> Proprietary GFX hardware which needs paid for codes to use (see comment earlier about Malaysia).
More open source code is available for more GPU functionality on the Pi than is available for the Nvidia graphics cards I've used for decades. That's not saying much, given how bad Nvidia is about this stuff, and how anemic the Pi GPU really is, but I'm not the one making these crazy comparisons.
It's like this with every aspect of this comparison. You need to be unaware of anything about how PCs are put together to buy it for a minute. PCs are full of proprietary stuff.
The firmware for your PC or its GPU is almost certainly closed source as well.