[dingi]

There are two fundamental issues in the ARM ecosystem for general-purpose computing: the lack of a standard boot environment and the lack of a reliable device auto-discovery mechanism. Device trees still require a lot of manual intervention. I haven't yet come across an ARM board that can boot a vanilla Debian AArch64 image without extra work. This makes me skeptical about the prospects of ARM in the desktop and laptop space. Is it really worth giving up the messy but standards-based x86 platform in exchange for bespoke ARM solutions?

[the_biot]

Hear, hear.

I find it amazing that ARM hasn't come up with an auto-discovery mechanism for their platforms. They're the only ones in a position to do it, and they've done exactly nothing about it. The device tree junk we have to live with is here to stay.

The U-Boot situation is really no better. Nearly every vendor ships with U-Boot, and it's always, always a fork that never gets updated. ARM should have taken that situation in hand decades ago, too.