I think a carrier board designed to work with the Framework using a RK3588 and RPi5 would be the closest of what we have to that. Probably will need a 3rd party vendor to do it. Framework has pointed out that they are willing to work with a vendor.

As someone with a fairly limited surface pro X I think I would not buy it. I do wonder if they can make an arm secondary board for the expansion bay on FW16. I imagine there could be some creative uses for that.

The chips are no where near performant enough to other x86 processors so probably no

ARM has a future only if correctly and heavily supported. I don’t see it anytime soon

I am using Windows on a Surface Pro X and it is mostly a smooth experience, but the performance of the SQ1 can be awful, would be interested in a more open ARM platform with better performance

Hehe I think maybe I want direct enough with my questions, based on the two answers above.

I basically only use stuff included with the distro, which with Ubuntu and pop os is a lot. All of that stuff world on arm just fine.

(Yes there are different ARM targets, but that’s true of Intel too…)

There are only two third party precompiled binaries I use: light works and result sync. Resilio sync comes with an arm version. Light works, I haven’t checked - but since they support apple silicon, one can assume that if desktop arm Linux became popular, they would support it.

One of the reasons I love Linux is freedom to choose your processor instead of being locked in, so …

Curious what other people might be running that only works on specific processors.

I’d like to have one - not sure if I’d purchase one. Part of what makes Apple Silicon so appealing is Rosetta 2. Microsoft would have to put a lot of effort into BW compatibility with x86 and I don’t have a lot of faith they will.

I’m not too interested in running Linux on the desktop.

Not really.

Qualcomm had been claiming their next chip will have good performance for laptops for 7 years, but every time has been a lie. If someone did come up with an ARM chip with enough performance, I’d be interested in trying it out. It wouldn’t be at the top of priority purchases list though.

While I truly love my M1 Mac , I think that Linux which is ultimately what I would be using on a Framework laptop, is lacking. That being said it is definitely something I that would make me consider buying a FW over laptops. So I’d say an ARM based FW would be great but I’d have to wait until people review the Qualcomm chip its using before purchasing.