The original post: /r/linux by /u/ptoki on 2025-01-20 20:48:36.

TLDR: The fragmentation and lack of general standards makes arm devices prone to be abandoned if the vendor drops support or not be able to get any linux support if vendor dont care.

Sorry for controversial/click bait title :)

Longer story:

As probably everyone knows, modern phones which could run linux cant because vendors dont care to provide even simple drivers or docs of how to interact with otherwise already supported hardware.

As a result a ton of perfectly fine devices end in a landfill.

The issue is much more wide even for sort of popular devices like many SBC. Not to mention devices like sharp netwalker or tablets from google, lenovo, dell which run on ARM.

Yes, ARM is not the one to blame but it is the common denominator for all these cases. It is pretty rare to have x86 device which cant run linux at all.

I had devices like oqo 01+, laptops like lifebook, panasonics cf series, up board computers and probably few more which I dont remember. They are all standard. I could load them with almost any linux (well, not the ones which arent 32bits now) but when they were supported in general they worked. Sure a touchscreen was not working here or there or a gpu was not recognized or the graphics card was running only in svga mode but the moment the driver was created for the device it just started to work after kernel update with maybe a config file edit.

With ARM devices it is not so. If vendor supports it and makes it standard (im not even sure if such standards exists) then you get a distro for it. Sharp published just one kernel source (AFAIK) for netwalker. The source was there, still it turns out it was no point of getting it mainlined in the kernel.

There are humble exceptions to that (raspberry pi, banana pi, dlink devices (at least in the past) - few others) but majority of arm devices cant be flashed with even simple debian like base distro.

I would love to hear about initiatives which address this. I would love to be able to turn my old phone into weather app display or ip monitor running linux and not just stitched and crafted third party app running on top of old android.