Cheap Windows Arm laptops are flooding the market, if someone can pick ONE laptop to support they could easily buy them on sale , refurbished them with Linux and make a profit.
Looks likes their are some challenges with doing this.
Valve is pushing mostly open source to expand to other platforms which is a win win for everybody.
Thousands of game studios are gone now, and supporting their software is important legacy work. You don't have to appreciate that, but I do. I do not give the faintest fuck about the opportunity cost you bemoan towards native UNIX games when I do this. That's your problem, not mine.
If Proton is "Linux" games, so is running GNU/Linux under a VM a proper distro.
I have faith!
Now we just need to be as good as (or better than) Apple's Rosetta.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/arm-translation-layer-steam-f...
I was also slowly loosing hope, although I do still run some NixOS ARM Raspberry PIs. But with the recent Valve backing, I'm back on the train again, and eagerly awaiting the slow but steady improvements, and figuring out where I can contribute back.
Integration, testing, and support are all expensive. Right or wrong, that's a reason why if a laptop "just works" (like a Mac, Windows Thinkpad, or a Chromebook), it probably has proprietary binaries.
Also, if you aren't paying for the OS (via the hardware it's coupled with), you can't expect the OS to have the benefits of tight hardware integration.
Even Framework laptops use proprietary boot firmware, and they've been pretty clear that they only provide support for Ubuntu and Fedora, not the alphabet soup of other Linux desktop distros.
Can we please move on to microkernels already? I'm fine with a tiny performance hit, I just don't want to get rooted because I plugged in the wrong USB stick.
That said, why do we still need drivers in 2025? Most regular printers should be dumb, U-MASS should be dumb, webcams should be dumb, monitors are dumb, etc... very few devices coming really needs custom drivers anymore (even with many customizations we could provide class specific descriptors that drivers could adhere to).
To do that on a MacBook I'm spending a minimum of 3200$.
If you have unlimited money ( or can expense it) a 3200$ to 4k MacBook is going to be the best experience money can buy.
If you have limited funds, a 200$ used computer can get the job done with the right distro.
On the other hand, if you're not running Wine, you can't get autorun virii from USB drives, plus the Windows virii just lives there and can't do anything.
Plan9 is like writing. You either do it, or talk about doing it. I'm talking not doing btw. I tried, but I got stuck on trivial things and the barrier to asking for help over 2+2= is high. (No offence intended. The 9 heads aren't interested in running a kindergarden)