I’ve seen people talking about it and experienced it myself with a server, but why does Linux run so well on ARM (especially compared to Windows)?

  • rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de
    34·
    1 year ago

    Windows’s achilles heel is arguably its chief benefit - legacy compatibility and being the de facto platform for applications.

    Back when I had a Surface RT, I thought it was awfully neat, ARM-compiled versions of Office, IE, Windows 8.x bits ran well and it was fanless with fine battery life. (although I surely sound weird, I had a Windows Phone back then too and the syncing with IE on both was a nice feature) It’s just they were pushing the Store then and if you jailbroke it, ARM applications were rare.

    Apple is a pro at architecture transitions and can steer the whole ship, MS can put Windows on ARM all they want but OEM’s will be reluctant since it’ll be a relatively big risk to sell a “Windows, buuut…” computer and the popular closed-source applications probably won’t bother with ARM for a while

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      3·
      1 year ago

      Apple can be much more heavy handed than Apple can. Apple controls their hardware ecosystem. They make everybody buy the architecture they want. They make the OS stop working on older hardware. They set minimum OS requirements for application writers. So, all the software ( from everybody - not just Apple ) gets moved to the new architecture quickly. It does not take long before being on the new architecture is all that makes sense.

      Windows on the other hand does not control the hardware. They are trying. They make their own now so they can at least seed the new ecosystem. However most Windows users buy their Windows hardware from somebody other than Microsoft. It makes sense for most hardware to target the larger application audience and that will be the old architecture. It makes sense for application devs to target the older architecture. For a long, long time, the older arch makes the most sense for almost everybody in the ecosystem. Only early adopters make the switch ( both users and application sellers ). In practice, that means that moving to the new arch means not having native apps in many cases which means the new arch will, in practice, be worse than the old one.