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by aseipp 1479 days ago
Windows on ARM is basically completely different at this point, it's perfectly functional; they have x64 emulation as of recently and it just uses normal UEFI for booting, just like most other normal laptops. Honestly the emulation is pretty good even if it's not as fast as Rosetta2, and they even now have a new 64-bit Windows ABI and calling convention that allows developers to incrementally port their applications to AArch64 on an individual DLL-by-DLL basis (so the emulator can handle transitioning between an x64 app and an AArch64 DLL, or the other way around.) They aren't just doing nothing.

The biggest problem is the hardware: you're basically just buying a poorly performing laptop with probably lagging Linux support if you get tired of Windows, and you could just buy an M1 Macbook and get superior performance and battery life for the same cost, and you can even just run Windows on that using Parallels and still get good performance. The AArch64 laptop market is mostly just Qualcomm processors and Apple, and if you actually care about the performance profile, there's basically no comparison between the two right now with current offerings; the Mac is the winner, and you can even run Linux on it.

2 comments

None of the major manufacturers are going to ship Linux to consumers. Having a version of Windows that actually has apps that they can ship means now building the hardware is worth it.
It's not as fast as Rosetta2 because M1 is about 2-3 times faster than the Qualcomm Microsoft is using