The interest for Asahi Linux should prove that there is a sizeable market for Linux on ARM. Admittedly the Asahi team are out of this world, but ARM is well understood and having a small Linux team of "ordinarily good" developers would be a drop in the bucket for Qualcomm.
I think there should be clear incentive there for a CPU manufacturer to establish itself as the reference ARM PC platform provider like Intel is on the x86 side.
>The interest for Asahi Linux should prove that there is a sizeable market for Linux on ARM
Interest for Asahi only proves there's interest for Linux on Apple devices, because they're already so popular and numerous, bought by millions of users first and foremost to run MacOS, not Linux.
There's zero interest for non-Apple ARM laptops because, unlike Macbooks, they have no market share. Nobody's gonna spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering GPU drivers for an ARM laptop that only 20 people on the planet bought, and in half of those cases it's sitting gathering dust.
Like I said, chicken and egg problem. There's not gonna be a massive upsell of ARM laptops if the equivalent SW ecosystem of Apple isn't there to move the HW off the shelves.
Yes, but Macbooks are currently the most best selling mainstream ARM laptops any average consumer has heard about and can easily get thei had on, for MacOS.
Apple and MacOS ecosystem guarantee amazing sales and mainstream popularization of these devices, giving them a numbers advantage, meaning it's by far the best choice platform to target with the biggest RoI for your reverse engineering effort versus some more obscure ARM laptops which could be better on paper but nobody bought.
The "market size" argument (or rather "installed base") implies that Linux can only exist as a parasitic PC operating system riding the coattails of established vendors, which I believe is no longer true in 2023. Big distros like Ubuntu and Fedora offer first class experience that rivals and surpasses MacOS and Windows in many ways, especially for technical (dev) markets and are worthy of their own ecosystem.
>Nitpick: there are 2-3B Linux devices out there are 64bit ARM.
The context of this thread was about ARM laptop devices, not generic ARM widgets. Please use the strongest interpretation of an argument when responding, not the weaker one for the sake of nitpicks, as per HN rules:
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I think there should be clear incentive there for a CPU manufacturer to establish itself as the reference ARM PC platform provider like Intel is on the x86 side.