Lower ISA license fees do nothing to help desktop users directly. The fact that “anybody can make one” is what will help. The competition and innovation that RISC-V will drive will eventually be a massive boon to end-users.

It is not hard to “make your own chips” anymore. The barrier to entry has dropped tremendously. Apple has their own chips. Google has their own chips. Samsung has their own chips. Microsoft even has their own chips. Except none of them actually “make” processors. They are all fabricated ( manufactured ) by TSMC in Taiwan. Only Intel really makes its own chips and even they do not make all of them. TSMC would fabricate chips for you too if you placed a big enough order.

It is less about the cost of the license and more about being able to license it at all. Only AMD and Intel can design chips implementing the x86-64 ISA. ARM is not much better. Only huge customers can get a license to create novel ARM chips. Most ARM customers are licensing core designs off of ARM themselves ( eg. Cortex

Anybody can legally design a RISC-V CPU—even you! So, if you are a company or country that cannot get access to x86 or even ARM ( like Alibaba / China ) then RISC-V is your answer. Or if you have an innovative idea for a chip, RISC-V is for you. And since it is Open Source, RISC-V allows you to collaborate on designs or even give them away:

https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan

The “desktop” market is incredibly hard to break into but that is because the “desktop” market is more about the operating system and its applications.

Apple can move to whatever ISA they want as they control both the hardware and the operating system. They have migrated several times, most recently to ARM with “Apple Silicon”.

Microsoft would love to move to ARM to compete with the power efficiency of Apple Silicon. Outside of gaming, the “desktop” market these days is laptops where things like battery life really matter. Microsoft has failed a few times though because of the application side. The recent push with Qualcomm X Elite looks the most promising but time will tell.

Only Microsoft and Apple matter on the desktop.

I use desktop Linux but Linux is less than 5% of the desktop market. That is a shame because Linux, with its vast ecosystem of Open Source applications, is a lot easier to port to new architectures.

You can run a RISC-V Linux desktop today. It will be super slow but you can do it.

We need RISC-V to get faster and more power efficient. Thankfully, there is competition.

I think you meant “should NOT” have more than one.

An alternative to Flatpak is Distrobox in which case you can have a different package manager inside Distrobox than you have on the host.

Fedora has packages that Debian does not? I have not used Fedora in a long time but is this true? Debian is reported to have twice as many packages as Fedora.

https://repology.org/

Or is this statement the result of things like COPR?

I did not know that there were common devs across Cinnamon and MATE.

I know that Mint wants to have app collaboration ( Xapps ) between Cinnamon, MATE, and XFCE. That makes more sense now.

These are then major GTK desktops that are not GNOME. GNOME apps are increasingly GNOME only so it makes sense for the rest of them to collaboration on a GTK experience that is not GNOME.

Shortest answer is that RISC-V is Open Source and ARM is proprietary but what does that mean?

First, it means “freedom” for chip makers. They can do what they want, not what they are licensed to do. There are a lot of implications to this so I will not get into all of them but it is a big deal. There is even a standard way of adding ISA extensions. It makes RISC-V an interesting choice for custom chip makers trying to position themselves as a platform ( think high-end, specialty products ).

If you are a country or an economy that is being hit with trade restrictions from the Western world ( eg. China ), then the “freedom” of RISC-V also provides you away around potentially being denied access to ARM.

For chip makers, the second big benefit is that RISC-V is “free” as in beer—no licenses. For chips in laptops or servers, the ISA license is a small part of the expense per unit. But for really high-volume, low-cost use cases, it matters.

In the ARM universe, middle of the market chip makers license their designs off of ARM ( not just the ISA ). This is why you can buy “Cortex” CPUs from multiple suppliers. Nobody else can really occupy this space other than ARM. In the RISC-V universe, you can compete with ARM not just selling chips but by licensing cores to others. So, you get players like StarV and MilkV that again want to be platforms.

So, RISC-V is positioned well across the spectrum—somewhat uniquely so. This makes it an excellent bet for building software and / or expertise.

It is only the ISA that is Open Source though. Unlike some of the other answers here imply, any given RISC-V chip is not required to be any more open than ARM. The chip design itself can be completely proprietary. The drivers can be proprietary. There is no requirement for Linux support, etc. That said, the “culture” of RISC-V is shaping up to be more open than ARM.

Perhaps because they want to be platforms, or perhaps because RISC-V is the underdog, RISC-V companies are putting more work into the software for example. RISC-V chip makers seem more likely to provide a working Linux disto for example and to be working on getting hardware support into the mainline kernel. There is a lot of support in the RISC-V world for standards for things like firmware and booting.

With the exception of RaspberryPi, the ARM world is a lot more fractured than RISC-V. You see this in the non-Pi SBC world for example. That said, if we do consider just RaspberryPi, things are more unified there than in RISC-V.

Overall, RISC-V may be maturing more quickly than ARM did but it is still less mature overall. This is most evident in performance. Nobody is going to be challenging Apple Silicon or Qualcomm X Elite with their RISC-V chips just yet. Not even the Pi is really at risk.

Eventually, we will also just get completely Open Souce designs that anybody can implement. These could be University research. They could be state funded. They could be corporately donated designs ( older generations maybe ). Once that starts to happen, all the magical things that happened for Open Source software will happen for RISC V as well.

Open Source puts a real wind at RISC-V’s back though. And no other platform makes as much sense from the very big to the very small.

Why doesn’t Arch just put yay in the repo?

It is hard for me to believe APL was popular. I forgot that Microsoft claimed to be making it for Motorola and Intel.

“Great artists steal” — Steve Jobs ( or Faulkner, or Picasso, or Stravinsky )

The name C++ is an inside joke as ++ is the C language increment operator, meant to imply that C++ is an improvement on C.

I have heard several times that the name C# was meant to look like the ++ had been added again to the name C++. The syntax of C# was chosen to be familiar to programmers that knew C++.

If we are saying old languages use letters for names and that newer ones use words, it is worth noting that C# was also heavily inspired by Java, which came first. Both Java and JavaScript are from 1995 ( iolder than C# ).

In the grand scheme, Go is not much newer than C#. Go is from 2009 and C# is from 2000. That might seem like a lot but Go was intended as an alternative to C which is from 1972.

C got its name as a progression over B, which started the whole single letter thing, but C syntax was chosen to look like ALGOL ( 1958 ). So we have to blame ALGOL for the look of C, C++, Java, C#, JavaScript, and even Rust.

Two of the oldest languages as FORTRAN and Lisp. Language names were often abbreviations ( such as FORmula TRANslation for FORTRAN ). Lisp was originally LISP ( list processing ) but the name Lisp, from 1960, fits right in with Go and Rust I would say.

The trend is certainly towards more whimsical names though. An early name for C was NB which stood for “New B”. If it were named like we do today, maybe it would have been called “Newbie” or some synonym of that. I kind of like Punk.

I dislike Apple as a company but I love Apple hardware. Old Macs are my favourite thing to run Linux on.

I agree with this. In the case of Chimera Linux, it is a goal of the distro to have “no legacy” and so it is Wayland and Pipewire only from the start. That limited their choices back when they were making the decision.

Xfce is still X only although they are making progress.

I got your joke ( it was not subtle ). I have absolutely no idea why that would prevent me from making my comment.

I would love to find time to play with Gleam

Bachefs is in the kernel now so trying it on a spare drive or partition is super trivial these days depending on distro. You only need a few minutes of time.

Getting it on root is a bit harder as almost no installers support it yet. The only distro I can think of is CachyOS.

Well, Ubuntu does not force you to use GNOME and GNOME is not exclusive to Ubuntu.

So, what you are basically saying is that you use Ubuntu and hate GNOME.

Whenever I see this spin, I just want to say: “No it wasn’t. It was compiled with Clang.”

https://chimera-linux.org/

Thanks for the EDIT because I thought I had really missed something.

I am addicted to Arch and the AUR but it is precisely that it is NOT Arch that makes Vanilla look attractive. Do I REALLY need multiple new kernels per month like Arch gives me?

Having a more stable base sounds like a great idea. Using containers to get access to the Arch repositories and the AUR on top of Debian sounds even better. Vanilla bakes support for that scenario right in.

I did not know this. Thank you for the history lesson.

Or just start introducing Linux containers and VMs that run on Linux. You can use Docker Desktop and Putty from Windows.

I almost want to agree with parts of this but I cannot imagine the downvotes for supporting a comment that includes “never hear about Jenkins” and “don’t learn Docker”.

Jenkins has about 50% market share for anybody keeping score at home. In many verticals, the market leader has about 35% market share so 50% gives Jenkins enough domination in the market that saying “never hear about” them is going to hurt your credibility.

I think most organizations using Kubernetes should not. However, most of those would still benefit from containerization and so knowing Docker is a good thing even if you use a different tech ( Podman is the same thing ). While I think people should not be using Kubernetes as much as they do, it is still going to help you to know it when you are asking those people to hire you.

Knowing Python is fantastic advice for DevOps and IT in general.

Ansible and Puppet are solid recommendations. I think Ansible is the market leader ( probably about a third ).

Keycloak is great but it had less than 5% market share and so not knowing it is not going to hurt.