I am still looking for a SoftIron OverDrive replacement

Yes, I know. Bad title. After so many years only a handful of people will decipher it that I am looking for an affordable and standards compliant ARM machine for Linux & FreeBSD. It refers to a machine released 8 years ago, and a blog I wrote 4 years ago: The ARM developers workstation: Why the SoftIron OverDrive 1000 is still relevant

The good news is that since my previous blog there is a lot more ARM hardware available. The bad news is that the problems remained the same: ARM hardware is either standards compliant or affordable. It is a huge spectrum, where you can decide on your own compromise. Cheap, slow, non-compliant. Expensive, fast, standards compliant. And many variants in between.

  • The Raspberry Pi did a fantastic job to make Linux on ARM affordable. However these boards are not standards compliant. They come with their own Linux-based OS, and you have to port your own, if you want to use something different. OpenSUSE, my favorite Linux distribution is still not ported to the latest Raspberry Pi.

  • There are many more ARM SBCs (Single-board computer) available on the market. Cheap, but lack standards compliance, and often support is unavailable in the upstream Linux / FreeBSD kernel. Even running the supplied distribution image can be problematic, not to mention a random Linux distro freshly downloaded from the Internet.

  • When Apple switched to ARM, Linux was ported to it relatively quickly. These machines are still not standards compliant, but at least they look stylish and provide a good performance. The Asahi Linux project does a fantastic job enabling Linux on Apple Silicon.

  • Ampere does a nice job on standards compliance. As far as I am aware, you can install any Linux distributions or FreeBSD on it, without any extra effort. However, it comes at a price, literally :-) Just check these stylish workstations at System76: Thelio Astra

  • It is going to be expensive too, but I am also looking forward to Nvidia’s upcoming desktop supercomputer: Project DIGITS. I am just learning AI, and this box seems to be the ideal for testing / developing AI applications.

  • Finally an ARM Laptop built for Linux: the Tuxedo Snapdragon X Elite notebook. It is not yet available, but I expect it to be more on the affordable end. The question is standards compliance, I read too many contradicting info on this topic. We will hopefully see it soon! And a related news from CES, probably even more forward looking: https://www.engadget.com/computing/qualcomms-snapdragon-x-chip-will-power-more-affordable-copilot-pcs-104029263.html

So, what will be my next ARM-based machine? Right now I am checking if the Raspberry Pi 500 is available here in Hungary. But I follow ARM news, just in case :-)

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