2013, the year of ARM Linux on the desktop?

>  PS. The title is a play on one of Slashdot's common memes .... "the year of Linux on the desktop", which seems to never arrive.  But with "ARM" added in there, it just might!

One of the issue holding ARM linux back, including RPi, is mainline integration.

The Fedora ARM guys keep slipping their timeframe for making ARM a primary

architecture.  It always seems to be a year away, the latest estimate is for

Fedora 20, a year from now, and tentatively only ARMv7 and up.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2013-January/004933.html

Debian has ARM as a primary architecture, but RPi isn't integrated into

mainline, and there looks to be a lot of work to do on device tree support.

The work being done by Gordon to try to fix RPi USB using FIQ looks unlikely

to make it into mainline

X-Window performance is another roadbloack.

Simon, the volunteer working on X-Window GPU acceleration has reported that

X relies heavily on CPU (not GPU) speed, so he is not optimistic that good X

performance can be achieved on low-speed CPUs such as RPi, unless each

application is individually tuned. 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=28294

The RPF is reportedly trying to tune Scratch, but Simon also reports

serious performance issues with Python's default IDE, IDLE:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=28294&start=19

and with the Geany editor:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=28294&start=21

@ coder27: some relevant point there, 'spesh from the Pi point of view.

I think that one of the hurdles to the "ARM + Linux desktop" combo is convincing hardware manufacturers that Linux support is good for business.

Bear in mind that I'm thinking of the concept of a desktop in a "consumer" sense - a box (not a board) that one purchases, unpacks, plugs in and it's (mostly) ready to go (bar the usual of getting it to talk to your home network and whatnot). Buying a box with no OS preinstalled would be a bar for many consumers, so doubtless most manufacturers will choose to ship their boxes with Android (because it's so ubiquitous), Most of our consumers would doubtless plod along with this without even realising that there are alternatives so to get Linux out there our box really needs to ship with Linux as well - and not just any old "fits where it touches" distro that will send our customer scurrying back to the familiarity of Android after five minutes, but something that provides a transparent interface between the customer, the applications that (s)he wants to run and the hardware that (s)he wishes to utilise.

That's what an operating system is supposed to do, after all. For most people it's just a means to an end rather than an end in itself. I think it's easy for people like us who habitually poke about in the guts of computers to forget that. So the charitable manufacturer might choose to preinstall Ubuntu and will then brace itself for a wave of "why don't you support this or that distro?" questions.

@ coder27: Whither Fedora: I don't think that they ever intend their product to be consumer level. It's alpha all the way and the page upon page of mailing list diatribe micro-analysing each meeting-about-the-previous-meeting that they produce in lieu of any kind of roadmap seems to bear this out. That's fine, someone has to do the cutting edge stuff, but it just feels like Fedora exists for it's own sake rather than to achieve any kind of stated goal. I don't think that provision of customer support or human readable documentation would be playing to their strengths either. [/soapbox]

The Pi thing in general shows how essential proper manufacturer support is from the outset - aside from the odd wobbly driver and the failure to utilise existing hardware features (which is fair enough, considering what it was made for) I think it demonstrates that limited hardware needs a complementary OS. Perhaps when quadcore ARM missiles are commonplace it won't matter, but it would be a shame IMO if yet again we tossed processing power at sub-optimal software instead of taking the time to write it properly in the first place.

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

. Perhaps when quadcore ARM missiles are commonplace it won't matter, but it would be a shame IMO if yet again we tossed processing power at sub-optimal software instead of taking the time to write it properly in the first place.

I have one of those, in the shape of a Sabre-Lite, but it also suffers from the same old problem as the pi - gpu drivers.  It also suffers from being 5x the cost of a Pi, but is very nice none the less.

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

. Perhaps when quadcore ARM missiles are commonplace it won't matter, but it would be a shame IMO if yet again we tossed processing power at sub-optimal software instead of taking the time to write it properly in the first place.

I have one of those, in the shape of a Sabre-Lite, but it also suffers from the same old problem as the pi - gpu drivers.  It also suffers from being 5x the cost of a Pi, but is very nice none the less.