Just recently repartitioned my MacBook:
1 GB for EFI (vfat)
2 GB for /boot (ext4)
11 GB for swap
224 GB for / (bcachefs)
Grub cannot load a kernel off bcachefs so I need ext4 to bridge the gap. Once the kernel is loaded, it has no problem using bcachefs as root.
This is a laptop. On a desktop that can handle more drives, I would split /home onto a drive of its own.
I agree with you. But there is Distrobox if you want to “bring your distro”
The best R5 SoC is about as fast as a Pi 4 and better in many ways but also much more expensive.
https://www.eswincomputing.com/en/bocupload/2024/06/19/17187920991529ene8q.pdf
R5 is improving faster than ARM. There are more companies designing R5 chips than ARM. The R5 software ecosystem is essentially ready and waiting.
For many workloads, the GPU or DSP is more important than the CPU. R5 is becoming viable for these use cases.
Automotive, automation, quality control, robotics, aI, are all within reach. The SBC market is just the mainstream version of that. And desktops are just further along the price / performance curve from there.
Chip designs take time. Then people need to license and manufacture them. We may see marketable performance on servers this year.
For SBCs, the performance has gotten to usable but price / performance sucks. That is a bit of a chicken / egg popularity problem so timing is tough to call. The rift between the US and China is slowing things down. We would have the Milk-V OASIS otherwise.
Desktop is really tough to call timing. The tech could probably be there next year. As ARM is showing though, you need a desktop OS (with market share) to drive that market. It is not going to be Apple. Microsoft cannot even make ARM work. So desktop Linux hardware on RISC-V may be a while.
Some Android phones and tablets could go RISC-V in 2026. If that happens, the same chips could appear on ITX boards for enthusiasts.
Qualcomm could surprise with RISC-V support after what ARM did to them. AheadComputing or somebody else could surprise as well. Mostly likely though, it is just going to take time.
You can run RISC-V on a “desktop” today if you want . Grab a ROMA II or Framework 13. Expect it to be slow.
Probably best he stops answering questions now. Stating positions will only limit his flexibility next election.
This one is already lost.
People recommend Mint mostly as a better Ubuntu I think. Ubuntu is still the most popular and, increasingly, not the best distro to start with.
Fedora currently fills the space that Ubuntu used to fill. Probably the biggest caveat with Fedora now is the lack of codecs by default.
Arch benefits not just from documentation but from its repo. Whatever you get told you need, it is always a relief to find it waiting there for you already tuned for your distro.
My current distro uses APK 3 as a package manager and that is already atomic. So I guess my current setup works fine, without any of the other hassles and limitations.
ffmpeg will do CPU detection and use features like AVX2 if available even on vanilla distros.
Makes very little difference
My current Linux distro uses APK 3 as a package manager. Updates are already atomic without the downsides of an immutable distro.
There are situations where immutable distros make sense but, for my desktop, it feels like a lot of compromise for benefits that do not move the needle for my use case.
Security is also a focus of my distro. My desktop does mot run any server workloads. I mess with it and tinker but I already use Distrobox and a COW file system. And I run two kernels, one bleeding edge (day-to-day) and one LTS (recovery). Recovering from breakage is just not a headline issue.
I guess the other factor is that I have limited time. So, my “tinker” budget is already spent. Playing with immutable distros may change my mind about them but they are far enough down the list that it may be some time before I do.
Bootable containers are something I want to play with though.