Open source is good or bad ?
by joboy from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6DWG0)
Please excuse my ignorance, I'm not a developer or programmer, I know very little about ISA, ARM RISC vs RISC-V, and open/closed source things, I only know that, open source is good not to have one single company to take control the whole computing industry, and to release OS to run on a specific type of computer hardware. I don't know if x86 architecture is open source or partly open source platform that closed source like Microsoft windows and open source Linux can run on it.
I started to play with the Raspberry Pi couple years back, and learned that there are quite a number of powerful ARM SBC and notebook released and I am tempted to try, but unfortunately most of them are only supported by Microsoft, or a specific modified version of Linux, I've to find my way to install other distro on them, there's very little to no support on that front from 3rd party.
Now that RISC-V is the new player and promising, it is open source as far as I understand, and there are few SBC and tablet designed to run on that, but there's still no standard. Like ARM which is also RISC, there's no one single OS can run on all ARM devices, for example, I don't know if Pi OS can boot on a Khadas Edge board at all. In comparison, some versions of Microsoft windows and most Linux distro can run on old x86 h/w with limited performance, due to old h/w does not support the code written for new CPU for example. Afterall, I am quite confused with that 'open source' thing, is it good or bad for the general public ?
I started to play with the Raspberry Pi couple years back, and learned that there are quite a number of powerful ARM SBC and notebook released and I am tempted to try, but unfortunately most of them are only supported by Microsoft, or a specific modified version of Linux, I've to find my way to install other distro on them, there's very little to no support on that front from 3rd party.
Now that RISC-V is the new player and promising, it is open source as far as I understand, and there are few SBC and tablet designed to run on that, but there's still no standard. Like ARM which is also RISC, there's no one single OS can run on all ARM devices, for example, I don't know if Pi OS can boot on a Khadas Edge board at all. In comparison, some versions of Microsoft windows and most Linux distro can run on old x86 h/w with limited performance, due to old h/w does not support the code written for new CPU for example. Afterall, I am quite confused with that 'open source' thing, is it good or bad for the general public ?