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Comment by perryizgr8 | Hacker News Reader

Why is this such a big issue? Can't you install any ARM Linux distro from a flash drive? Does that not work? I get that device drivers may not be perfect for any new laptop, but it should mostly work.

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Linus Torvalds: ARM has a lot to learn from the PC :

"I think ARM is a very promising platform," he said. "At the same time, the ARM community has never had the notion of a standard platform. ARM never had the PC."

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220438/linus-torvalds-...

Nothing else ever had the PC. And IBM wasn't too happy that it happened to them, either.

It definitely makes Apple's decision to never allow generics seem wise in retrospect.

But they did at one point in the late 90’s. I wouldn’t say that was the only reason why they nearly went bankrupt, but it certainly didn’t help.

Yeah, "never" was the wrong word. I forgot about that.

In a way, they themselves started becoming a manufacturer of "IBM compatibles", they just locked their OS to them.

A Jobs-less alternate Apple universe might've been interesting though. He both canned the licensed Apple clones and made OpenStep into the next major MacOS revision. If Copland would've been OS 8 or BeOS as OS X, there could be viable clones, and thus maybe enough critical mass to keep PowerPC alive a bit longer.

We did actually but Acorn canned it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_(computer)

That's not what he means by PC. He means an open standard that anyone can build against with comparability between products.

That’s exactly what it was. Two other vendors were going to launch as well.

The Phoebe's launch OS (RISC OS 4) was codenamed "Ursula". Unfortunately, shortly into its development, the Phoebe went on an (indefinite) break.

In 1998, it would be an excellent opportunity to use Linux. At the time, I was playing with Apple's MkLinux on PowerMacs.

Very interesting, the reason for cancelling seems to largely hold true today.

I'm curious, is there any reason that ARM doesn't have a standard platform? Or they are working on that?

It does, and it's called Arm SystemReady.

UEFI + ACPI is required on Arm if you want to boot Windows or RHEL/CentOS, which do not even try to boot on non-standardised 64-bit Arm systems.

Same for SLES/openSUSE, except for some platforms (RPi) where they use u-boot to provide EFI.

They are different vendors, working on different products...

There’s a lot of proprietary hardware inside the MacBook M1s. The only reason device drivers exist is thanks to reverse engineering efforts. For this reason, no you can’t just install any vanilla ARM distro and expect things to work.

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