[IshKebab]

No chance. Linux on the desktop will never happen because of fundamental structural issues (lack of funding, no motivation for open source devs to make it good enough for normal people, many naysayers in the community not wanting it to work well for normal people).

RISC-V doesn't have any structural issues that would mean it can't succeed. In fact it already is very successful, but it's mostly in embedded and invisible CPUs at the moment which is why it might not seem like it.

It definitely needs some time to mature for application class processors but I can't see any reason why it won't.

[speed_spread]

There's no _particular_ reason to adopt RISC-V either, they'll just compete on price because there's no license to pay. So the Linux comparison applies in that even when RISC-V reaches performance parity with ARM/x64, the installed base of the incumbents will be enough to prevent mass migration.

[IshKebab]

I'm not sure that is the case for two reasons:

1. There's no big ecosystem of compiled ARM code to prevent people moving to RISC-V. In the embedded world everything is always compiled from source so it doesn't matter. On Android everything except games is bytecode. Maybe on Windows/Mac... but that's probably the last place we'll see RISC-V.

2. ARM and RISC-V are much more similar than ARM and x86 so it is way easier to translate ARM to RISC-V. It's also much more extensible so you can easily add instructions that you need to make the translation easy. I believe ARM has some instructions that are specifically included to make running x86 code easier - that sort of thing would be even easier on RISC-V.

You're probably right about price being the major differentiator, but I wouldn't underestimate that! Especially with ARM turning the screws on license fees.

[speed_spread]

If we're only speaking of embedded, yeah, ARM is doomed in the long term. I was thinking about desktop and servers where performance and compatibility are more important.