4/20

People routinely use worse options because of familiarity

Ships with windows or blank disk (selectable). Ubuntu/mint/fedora are officially supported but you could install other distros like arch

Not a backdoor, just undocumented commands on the hci. You would already need access to the device from the microcontroller side to leverage them. Also it’s not uncommon for older devices like this to have undocumented commands

Things will work for the most part, but be slow and have many pain points for a little while. ARM support isnt 100% across the board yet, and development in this direction is going to take a while given ARM conversion took a few years with major vendors switching over. RiscV will prob take a bit longer. Jeff Geerling has a video on a riscv itx motherboard from Milk-V