As a long time ARMv7/aarch64 Linux user, I totally forgot that things in #Linux x86_64 land can be quite cursed, too.

My new AliExpress-sourced P8 Intel N100-powered 8" mini-laptop re-educated me in how difficult some hardware can be.

I only managed to boot Ubuntu and Fedora installers successfully and went with Silverblue (instead of NixOS). I now have an Intel device that boots up with screen sideways and uses Software Rendering 🫣️ (1/2)

Long story short, the old wisdom turns out to be true still: If you want things to be painless, don't buy random hardware and stick to supported things.

Also: Hey, at least it IS booting!

I will see how much time I can responsibly spend on this cursed machine. (2/2)

@linmob yeah if you think x86 hardware is easy, just look at practically all the low end atom hardware and weep, it's basically the same as using ARM hardware

@pocketvj The knob works, so far. I have attempted to rotate things early on with grub CMD line, but that only led to more issues - I would love to have a look at your script though :) Do you have the same mini-laptop?

@martijnbraam Yeah.. Although I must say that I managed to Ubuntu-fy (back then I still was into that) some ASUS 8" VivoTab quite well. Rotation matrix stuff was major pain, but after I had that figured out, it was mostly fine.

@linmob hoooh, Alder Lake... Anything from the low-end range Intel provides is hell.
The Atom ones from old (Nokia Booklet 3G for example) are doubly so with their PowerVR GPU.

Even Chromebooks are super cursed. Gemini Lake Chromebook with apparently everything working - no brightness control and I haven't figured out even how to get any debug info out of the thing 😑

Update: I pressed Escape and entered AMI UEFI - yes, secure boot was indeed on :)

@pak0st Regarding Chromebook things, including debugging, watching https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11929-turning_chromebooks_into_regular_laptops is something I recommend.

@linmob will give it a look, thanks!

It's a spare device with another issue (internal display output going garbled after awhile) so I'm not very motivated to work it at the moment

@martijnbraam @linmob While x86 hardware can be pain, it usually does not have problem booting bootloaders or charging its batteries. I expect RISC-V to be improvement over x86 CPUs, and it would be cool to have some kind of next-generation platform. We should not really need 100 drivers for RTC.

@pavel @linmob are you sure? you never had one of those early atom laptops with uefi booting only but requiring a 32 bit EFI payload to boot a 64 bit OS?

@martijnbraam @linmob Not sure, and have not met those uefi-only laptops, fortuantely. But I'm sure they for example power down when battery goes low? Don't require vendor-patched u-boot of particular version to init their DRAM? Can charge battery without vendor-patched Linux kernel successfully booted? I really wish there was standard arm64 platform (and standard risc-v platform).

@pavel @linmob therer is a standard platform. If you want an ARM platform that acts like an x86 machine you need to get ARM SBBR compatible stuff. It's ACPI on arm and Just Works (tm)

@martijnbraam @linmob I never seen machine with ARM SBBR. Yes, that's a step in right direction, I wish PinePhone (etc) would be using that. (And it would be nice to have something similar for R-V, preferably without complexity of ACPI.)

@pavel @linmob I have one, it's nice. If only the SBC manufacturers would start making sbbr boards