How’s the GPU drivers though? Especially to me for Linux. These should be used in PC gaming handhelds but Qualcomm support is mediocre

linux on arm is not mature. on windows, typically emulation of x86 is used. They’ll need to also support all of the gpu libraries for gaming.

Desktop linux on arm*. The kernel itself has been running on embedded arm deviced for 25 years and on a large portion of phones for 15.

The question was about GPU drivers, and GPU drivers for ARM-based SoCs aren’t even mature on Android. They are going to suck on Linux.

Compared to the drivers for Mali, Adreno and consorts, Nvidia is a bunch of saints, and we know how much Nvidia drivers suck under Linux.

Asahi linux is perhaps only distro that is trying to support “desktop arm”. Not just gpu, but it does not post for M3/M4 arm chips. Qualcom does not have an OS protection racket, and so could be more helpful to the project, but phone support (limited/tailored to each chip generation it seems) doesn’t seem to mean all future arm automagically supported.

There are quite a few more. For example Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Fedora, Alpine and Kali also have ARM ports (and probably many others too). Raspberry OS is purpose-built for ARM Desktop. There’s others too.

Asahi isn’t specifically an ARM Linux, but an Apple Silicon Linux.

Apple Silicon is ARM, but it’s also its own semi-custom thing that’s not directly compatible with other ARM stuff.

That’s the main issue with supporting ARM: You don’t have one platform like x86/x64.

On x86/x64 there’s an abstraction between the machine code language and the microcode that’s actually executed in the CPU. There’s a microcode translation layer in the CPU that translates one to the other, so x86/x64 chip designers have a lot of freedom when designing their actual CPU. The downside being that the translation layer consumes a little bit of performance.

There’s also the UEFI system and a ton of other things that keep the platform stable and standardized, so that you can run essentially the same software on a 15yo Intel CPU and a modern AMD.

ARM is much more diverse. Some run Devicetree, some don’t. There are also multiple different ARM architectures, and since they are customizable, there’s just so much variety.