[throwaway2037]

    > I can recall the horror on reading articles how Raspberry Pi boot was working

I am confused by this comment. RPi is legendary for their driver support. A large portion of the company is dedicated to it. I would say this is the primary reason that they can fend off cheap clones from China, whereas 3D printers are all but defeated at this point.

[coldtea]

The bootloader boot/process however is not related to driver support.

Not that I know what's nightmarish about it in the Pi.

[mkesper]

The Pi is really a GPU with a CPU added on so the whole system needs to be brought up by the (binary blobs for running the) GPU. Hopefully not the case in these more PC-like systems...

[coldtea]

Huh? Never got deep into it, but always thought it was some kind of arm cpu with underpowered integrated gpu or similar.

[garretraziel]

It’s actually a GPU that handles initial stages of booting, through some closed-source firmware blob.

[throwaway2037]

Bootloader doesn't count?