It's incredible how in 2025 people still don't grasp what a system on a chip is [1], and that the CPU cores are just a small part of the whole. Your operating system is barely concerned about the instruction set, and much more concerned about the buses and so on that are available, and how to drive them.
You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
The author appears to be nostalgic for the wintel monopoly that made it possible to write software for one system standard "PC" and have it run on dozens of different manufacturer's hardware. The people who use ARM chips typically write their own code because they aren't building general purpose computers, they are building an appliance of some sort, whether its a phone or an access point or a disk controller.
Been here for a few years already honestly. I've found Raspis kind of annoying to deal with, and x86 mini PCs a lot more consistent and reliable.
Still holding out hope for RISC-V though, my little Milk-V pico-size Ubuntu boards are pretty cool, and I'd much rather write Linux code than rp2040 code directly (because I'm not an embedded developer and don't really know what I'm doing lol)
Vendors don't need to ship their own images at all. Just let users install stock Debian, then provide a thin vendor package set (kernel, u-boot, DTBs, firmware) tied together by a meta-package. With apt pinning, upgrades become normal Debian transactions, security updates track Debian, and the vendor layer shrinks to a small LTS kernel delta plus boot bits.
Many architectur is free. Spark, MIPS, etc. No problem found a free solution.
But problem is blobs. Many blobs, everywhere blobs for running CPU (motherboard too), blobs in ethernet, wifi, BT etc.
> Raspberry Pi OS is only based on Debian bookworm (released in 2023) and very explicitly does not support a key Debian feature: you can’t upgrade from one Raspberry Pi OS release to the next, so it’s a complete reinstall every 2 years instead of just an upgrade.
What? I've upgraded my RPis in-place every single time there's a new OS release. They don't support upgrading that way, perhaps, but I've never had a problem.
And even for official Debian releases, they recommend you do a full backup, because it might not work.
ARM is great, ARM is terrible, and so is RISC-V
(changelog.complete.org)50 points by edward 12 September 2025 | 18 comments
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You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip
Still holding out hope for RISC-V though, my little Milk-V pico-size Ubuntu boards are pretty cool, and I'd much rather write Linux code than rp2040 code directly (because I'm not an embedded developer and don't really know what I'm doing lol)
THIS IS PROBLEM
What? I've upgraded my RPis in-place every single time there's a new OS release. They don't support upgrading that way, perhaps, but I've never had a problem.
And even for official Debian releases, they recommend you do a full backup, because it might not work.