Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

It seems like support is finally actually getting fully there for Windows on ARM. Native apps you have Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Photoshop and Lightroom, the Office suite, LibreOffice, Dropbox, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, .NET, VLC, Spotify, 7zip, Zoom... so many names, many of which are very recent to the list.

Of course there is still software missing native support (WhatsApp, Steam/most games, Slack, Adobe PDF reader) but the emulated support of both 32 bit and 64 bit x86 is there now so, so long as it doesn't have a kernel component (e.g. game anti-cheats), it'll actually at least run instead of "well, what version of x86 was that app?".

Combine that with the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite hardware and, supposedly, opening up to more than just Qualcomm and that it's an ARM Windows device won't necessarily have to be a bad thing anymore. The one last nut to crack is (ironically, for Windows) games. Until things like Fortnite are published with the ARM anti-cheat that'll be a big last snag which takes a while to clean itself up.

I just hope this won't eventually be the death of true device ownership. For all its cruft and flaws, x86 has served well as a standard platform for hackability and for alternative OSes like Linux to flourish on. Switching to ARM would give Microsoft and manufacturers an excuse to do away with all that.

I don't know what's the state of UEFI on ARM these days, but in a decade we could easily find ourselves in the same dire situation as phones, with a jungle of OEM-specific images, walled garden software and a boot chain cryptographically locked down.

All WoA (Windows 10/11 on ARM) devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7/8cx Gen 3 seem to allow disabling UEFI SecureBoot, AFAIK earlier SoCs did as well.

OpenBSD/arm64 runs on the Microsoft Dev Kit 2023 and Lenovo ThinkPad x13s machines, out of the box. OpenBSD supported booting/installing on these even before Linux, although Linux support has improved.

https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

That's good news, as long as disabling Secure Boot doesn't put your device in a "no fun allowed" zone where it's cut off from banking, Netflix, etc. Like SafetyNet on Android.

I'm not aware of anything that depends on the SecureBoot status of a device, except possibly Widevine DRM for video streaming, but I don't see how that would be unique to ARM, disabling SecureBoot is also usually required on x86 for running alternative OSes without Microsoft's signed shim bootloader.

There is no Widevine support for OpenBSD anyway, so it's never been possible to watch Netflix. Fortunately, there are solutions for that...

Incidentally, Fedora Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon (ARM) got Widevine (hence, Netflix) working without any form of SecureBoot, they wrote about it recently on their blog.

One thing I know is the most invasive anti-cheat of them all: Vanguard. When you are running Windows 11 it requires secure boot to be enabled (IIRC this isn't the case for when running Windows 10).

On a different note, I actually learned a bit ago, that setting up secure boot with your own keys is not too hard if you are running a UKI, with only needing to sign systemd-boot and the kernel.

With your own keys, you mean adding your MOK (machine owner key), or going the entire way, with the Microsoft ones removed?

The first one is easy, the second one seems to be more complicated, especially if you have Option ROMs signed by the keys you would like to remove.

I mostly just let `sbctl` do its stuff automatically, but I do manually enroll my own keys and the Microsoft keys (when in Setup Mode), since they apparently might be required for some things to work correctly.

Linux-dedicated hardware is growing so I do think this will be avoidable. They might not be on ARM but they will likely still be sold and exist (unlike with mobile where say a Linux phone is unusable).

CrowdStrike also has an ARM version now. I recall reaching out to their support back when Apple M1 chips were out and finally get Windows 11 ARM virtualized and asking if they planned on an ARM client. At the time there was no demand but yes, it seems like ARM on Windows is headed in the right direction.

Can’t resist the urge to think Microsoft has their own silicon in the works.

This should also help with the performance of Electron apps like Slack and Discord since their Chromium-based, right?

Chromium and Electron have long supported ARM, since late 2019 or so IIRC. Google just hadn't published an official version of Chrome itself (which includes the branding, sync, widevine, etc). This is why Edge/Brave have had their own official ARM64 versions for years - the Chromium base already supported it.

Slack and Discord just choose to not publish ARM64 versions of their Electron apps.

Chrome already runs on android, and windows... Chrome on windows arm64 is just a compiler option away.

It's a bit more than that as you need to ensure that all of the platform specific code is cross-arch. So while the core is already ready there is tons and tons of I/O that will need fixing and testing.

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