It one of reason why i don’t like entire arm stack and ideas they put it in it. It wild garden without any standardised and closed gardgen of which vendor and mostly and the worst part is that most people are totally okay with it because 'the battery life is great. We are literally regressing thirty years in terms of hardware ownership. On x86, there’s an expectation of a ‘common language’ between the OS and the silicon, but the ARM ecosystem is a fragmented disaster of proprietary silos. Because there’s no UEFI and no ACPI for the vast majority of consumer ARM chips, the hardware can’t even describe itself to the operating system. You’re stuck relying on Device Trees hard-coded maps of the hardware that are almost always closed-source or trapped in some vendor’s stagnant 5.x kernel fork.
If the manufacturer decides to stop supporting your device, it doesn’t matter if the silicon is still powerful; it becomes a paperweight because you can’t just ‘install a clean OS’ on it. You’re a tenant on your own device, praying that some developer on a forum spends a year reverse-engineering the proprietary blobs just so you can get basic GPU acceleration or Wi-Fi working on a mainline kernel.
We’ve traded the ‘General Purpose Computer’ for a disposable appliance model. We’re letting vendors kill off the concept of standardized firmware in exchange for slightly better efficiency, and by the time people realize they don’t actually own the ‘stack’ they paid for, it’ll be too late to demand an open standard. It’s a walled garden where the walls are made of undocumented registers and signed bootloaders that treat the owner like an intruder
Yup, my thoughts on this subject exactly and its so frustrating watching both tech people and non-tech people alike, adopt it in the guise of better battery life. The tech people should know better, but they either aren’t “hardware people” so they don’t know, or they do know, and don’t care.
It one of reason why i don’t like entire arm stack and ideas they put it in it. It wild garden without any standardised and closed gardgen of which vendor and mostly and the worst part is that most people are totally okay with it because 'the battery life is great. We are literally regressing thirty years in terms of hardware ownership. On x86, there’s an expectation of a ‘common language’ between the OS and the silicon, but the ARM ecosystem is a fragmented disaster of proprietary silos. Because there’s no UEFI and no ACPI for the vast majority of consumer ARM chips, the hardware can’t even describe itself to the operating system. You’re stuck relying on Device Trees hard-coded maps of the hardware that are almost always closed-source or trapped in some vendor’s stagnant 5.x kernel fork.
If the manufacturer decides to stop supporting your device, it doesn’t matter if the silicon is still powerful; it becomes a paperweight because you can’t just ‘install a clean OS’ on it. You’re a tenant on your own device, praying that some developer on a forum spends a year reverse-engineering the proprietary blobs just so you can get basic GPU acceleration or Wi-Fi working on a mainline kernel.
We’ve traded the ‘General Purpose Computer’ for a disposable appliance model. We’re letting vendors kill off the concept of standardized firmware in exchange for slightly better efficiency, and by the time people realize they don’t actually own the ‘stack’ they paid for, it’ll be too late to demand an open standard. It’s a walled garden where the walls are made of undocumented registers and signed bootloaders that treat the owner like an intruder
Yup, my thoughts on this subject exactly and its so frustrating watching both tech people and non-tech people alike, adopt it in the guise of better battery life. The tech people should know better, but they either aren’t “hardware people” so they don’t know, or they do know, and don’t care.